Stranger in a Blocky Land
by Mega Bear
Summary: "Stranger in a Blocky Land" follows Lou, a human who has fallen into the realm of Blockland. Lou must survive zombies, raiders, and dinosaurs in this foreign place so that he may return home. [I've stopped working on this story, so unfortunately there is no ending. Just a heads up.]
1. The Newcomer

**CHAPTER ONE: THE NEWCOMER**

The sun warmed his skin while cicadas droned in the dry air and birds called out in the distance. His eyes were still closed; he had yet to wake up. The dirt he lay on was as hard as plastic, and its lack of comfort stirred the man in his sleep.

Something prodded the man. His eyes split open to peer around. A blocky woman stood over him, dressed in a cap and a dress. She wore cracked boots and gloves stained brown from years of digging through soil.

"Are you okay mister?" asked the blocky woman.

"What—" the man began. He sat up, rubbing his head. It felt rigid, and every bit as square as the woman standing next to him.

"Well, are you okay? You need water?"

The man looked around, surveying his surroundings. Segmented olive green stalks rose up all around the man and the blocky woman, and ended in golden cones. The dirt they grew from was reddish brown, but not easily broken. Everything was blocky. _Blocky._

"Where the hell—" the man started. He paused to look down at his hands. They too were square. "Where the hell am I?"

"Jeez mister, you must have bumped your noggin. Can you stand up?" She offered him a hand, which he accepted after a hesitant moment of staring at it. She helped him to his feet. "My name's Merriweather," she told him. "Do you have a name?"

"Uh," he stopped and looked around. By standing up he was given a wider view of the landscape. It was expansive, covered with identical cornstalks for miles. The reddish dirt stretched flatly for as far as he could see.

Merriweather was convinced the man must have been baking outside for hours. He wasn't speaking very clearly at all, and seemed to be totally thrown off by his surroundings. He could have suffered a heat stroke out here and collapsed in her family's cornfield.

"Let's get you inside," she said. "You need some water." She grabbed his hand and lead him through the maze of stalks until they came to a narrow pathway leading through the vegetation. They walked down the path and eventually emerged before a green and white ranch house, with tall columns reaching up from the concrete porch to support an overhung roof. Potted ferns were arranged at the corners of the porch, while spotless white benches sat between them.

"Pa!" shouted Merriweather. "Pa, I need your help!"

She led the confused man up onto the porch and sat him down on a bench, then disappeared into the house. The man turned in his seat and looked around. Now that he was out of the cornfield, the landscape unfolded before him. Miles and miles away were red and brown mesas, which looked to be made of clay. Only the man knew they weren't—everything in this land was composed of studded building blocks. The cornstalks previously surrounding him were really stacks of cylinders topped by a cone. The columns on the porch were two-by-two rounds piled up to the ceiling. The ferns next to him were green, inverted ramps stretching up and out of the pots they were planted in.

The front door of the house snapped open, and a man stepped out with Merriweather following. "Hi there, I'm Grant," said the man. He offered the confused porch-sitter a glass of water, which he accepted. The glass was a clear round cylinder, but nevertheless it replenished the confused man the moment he brought it to his lips. Its effects were immediate—the confused wanderer gained mental clarity and was cooled off.

"Do you have a name?" Grant asked.

The confused man nodded. "Lou."

"Well Lou, nice to meet you. Any idea what you were doing out in my cornfield?"

Lou gave it some thought. He couldn't remember how he got in the field, but he knew he didn't belong in this land. He belonged in a world where people were made of flesh, and each cornstalk was unique, and the dirt was soft, not hard.

"No," Lou finally admitted. "Honestly, I don't know."

"Any idea where you came from?"

"Uh, Manhattan."

"Manhattan," Grant repeated. "Never heard of Manhattan." He turned back to face Merriweather. "Have you ever heard of Manhattan, dear?"

"No, Pa. Must be a core city."

"Right," he nodded. "Must be a core city. You come from the core cities, Lou?"

Lou was clueless, but he answered the question nonetheless. "Yes." But then he realized going with the flow of the conversation just because he was confused would get him nowhere. He waved his answer out of the air. "No, no. I mean, no. I don't come from a core city. I don't come from this place at all. Why is everything blocky? Where _am _I?"

"You're on my farm, stranger. On the edge of the Chrome Empire. That ring a bell?"

"No . . ."

Grant looked back at his daughter, then back to Lou. "You're in Blockland, Lou. _That _ring a bell? Don't think I can get any broader."

Blockland was certainly an apt name. Lou decided he would get nowhere further with his hosts, and gave in. "Yeah, Blockland. I know the name. It's coming back to me."

"Swell, swell. Do you have a home, Lou?"

"I don't know."

"You should stay the night," said Merriweather. Grant gave her a disapproving look, trying to hide it from Lou, but she continued to talk. "Just until you get your mind back. That would be fine, right Pa?"

Grant slowly turned back to Lou and nodded. "Sure. Would you like to stay, Lou?"

He didn't have much of a choice. Blockland was totally foreign to him. "Yeah. Thanks," he said.

"Well there it is. We've got out first guest in years, Merriweather. Why don't you be a dear and go get started on dinner, love."

"Yes, Pa."

Merriweather went back into the house, leaving Grant and Lou alone on the porch. "Looks like night's almost here," Grant observed. Lou turned in his seat and saw the sun, a corona flare, was setting behind a mesa. There was no moon in the sky to complement it. The night sky would be a deep, barren indigo. "Let's head inside."

Grant led Lou into the house. The interior, much like the environment outside, was made entirely from connectable bricks. Everything from the padded wicker chair—which really just looked like a brown and white couch—to the light fixtures were built out of the studded pieces that seemed to compose the entire world.

"I'll show you around the house," said Grant. "After that Merriweather should be done with our dinner, then we'll go off to bed."

Lou followed Grant through the living room, which was furnished with the aforementioned wicker chair, a dark brown coffee table, and a television against the wall. The TV looked out of place in this ranch house surrounded by cornfields, but Lou didn't mind. Life must be very dull out here, and a TV offered a great escape from the beating sun and hard dirt.

"This is the second floor," Grant said as they approached a set of stairs. "Merriweather and I sleep up there. Ain't nothing for you to see though, but if you need me, that's where I'll be for the night."

"I won't be sleeping up there?"

"No sir, you'll be in the basement. Follow me."

They went around the stairs and found another set directly underneath them, this time leading down through the floor. Grant walked into the basement first, and toggled a light switch when he hit the bottom. The basement was illuminated by a round brick attached to the ceiling, and revealed the contents of the cellar—an empty wine rack, a pair of crates, and a dusty old bed.

"Ain't the best lodging, but it's nice and dark down here. You shouldn't have much trouble getting off to sleep."

Lou walked over to the bed and placed a hand on it. The comforter was caked in a layer of dust, but he would be lying if he said it wasn't soft. Beggars can't be choosers, he figured. A bed was a bed, and this one would work for the night.

"Pa! Lou! Dinner's ready!" they heard Merriweather yell from upstairs. The pair walked up the stairs and stepped onto the ground floor. Lou could see through the windows how dark it had gotten outside. The land surrounding the house was lit up by a couple lanterns, but the cornfields and mesas beyond were smothered by total darkness. He would hate to be stuck outside after dusk, it must be impossible for a person to find their way home.

"What did you fix, love?" Grant asked as they stepped into the kitchen. It doubled as a dining room, with a short table surrounded by three chairs pressed up against a wall.

"Corn," she replied, and set down three plates in front of the chairs. Each plate had a yellow cylinder on it, with a little pad of butter sitting next to it in the form of a flat one-by-one round brick.

Grant and Merriweather took their seats, and Lou followed their example. The meal only lasted a few seconds, and when it was finished, Merriweather took their plates to the sink.

"It's dark, dear." Grant peered out a window. "Why don't you wait until morning to wash the dishes. We should go to bed."

"If you say so, Pa."

Merriweather stepped away from the sink and hurried upstairs. Grant patted Lou on the shoulder. "You have a good rest, stranger. Maybe in the morning you'll have more of your mind back."

Grant left the kitchen and went upstairs, leaving Lou alone. He turned the kitchen light off and went down to the basement, ready to get some rest. The bed was still dusty, which was disheartening to Lou, but he sucked it up and grabbed the comforter. He peeled the thick blanket back and shook it in the air, sending the dust flying in all directions. Lou was forced to cover his mouth to avoid the newly-created dust storm.

After climbing into bed with the comforter over him, Lou drifted off to sleep.

• • •

He awoke a few hours later to the sound of banging on the wall above. Lou figured it must be morning, and his hosts were getting started with their day. He rolled out of bed and turned the light on, then went upstairs.

He was wrong. It was still night.

The banging on the wall had stopped, however, so now he stood in complete silence and darkness by the stairs. He ventured out of the stairwell and stepped into the living room, where the windows shifted and jumped with movement outside. Lou crept closer to the windows, unable to discern what the source of the movement from beyond was. Visibility was so bad, the dark indigo bathing the land outside might as well have been pitch black.

And then he saw them.

There were people outside, but they did not move with the same purpose and intelligence of people. They shambled about, pausing only to decide which direction they should shamble to next. Clothing covered their bodies, giving them a shred of civilized credibility, but their faces erased all possibility of these people being rational creatures. The faces, oh, the faces. They were twisted traces of once-thinking citizens, now horribly disfigured into two dead eyes and a gaping mouth. They had hands stained red and brown by blood.

They were terrifying.

Lou hit the deck in fear as the pounding on the wall commenced. He realized: The creatures outside, the disfigured and bloody versions of the blocky people who seemed to inhabit this land, _they _were the source of the wall pounding. They were mindlessly beating the wall.

Lou began a tense crawl back to the stairwell, where he climbed the stairs to the second floor. This story was a hallway ending in a window, though Lou allowed himself to stand here since none of the creatures outside would be able to see him.

There were three doors branching off from the hallway—two pink doors and one brown door. He figured one of the pink doors must belong to Merriweather, and the brown door must belong to Grant. He couldn't figure out what the other pink door was for, but he didn't give it much thought. He walked over to Grant's door and slowly, carefully, opened it up.

"Grant?" he said in hushed urgency. "Grant? Are you awake?"

No response.

Lou opened the door wider and spotted a lump in Grant's bed. He tiptoed into the room and pulled the blanket back. Grant lay there, stirring from his sudden lack of cover.

"What? Lou?" he said. "What is it?"

"Grant. There are people outside."

"People?" he sat up, ready to get out of bed. "Is it morning?"

"No, night."

"Oh," Grant sighed. "No, those aren't people. They're zombies."

"_Zombies?_" Lou's breathing quickened. "Shit, Grant, we have to get out of here."

"They're nothing to worry about. Don't let them see you and they won't have a reason to come inside." Grant fell back into his pillow. "Why don't you go back to bed. Be careful going downstairs."

"Grant—"

He waved Lou away. "Get some sleep."

Lou nodded and walked out of the room, closing the door. He went down to the basement and tried to sleep with the lights on.

• • •

The morning came accompanied by the drone of the cicadas. Lou had slept in staggered bouts, never getting more than twenty minutes of sleep at a time. It was only when Grant came walking down the steps that he realized it was morning.

"Kind morn, Lou. Sleep well?"

"Yes," he lied.

"Good, you'll need your rest for what comes next."

Lou sat up. "What do you mean?"

"Come along, you'll see." Grant brought Lou outside and popped open a crate next to the house. He handed him a sword. "We've got a zombie who didn't return to the caves when the sun came up."

"They're supposed to do that?"

"Yeah, zombies can't stand the sun. Didn't you know that?"

"No."

"Wow," Grant marveled. "You really _aren't_ from here, are you?"

"No. Manhattan never gets zombies."

"Then this'll be your first chance to see one up close. This'll be your initiation." Grant produced a shotgun, seemingly from nowhere, and pumped it. "Anyway, come along."

They went around to the other side of the house, where a compact wooden shed sat like a monolith. It had no windows, just a single door with a crescent carved into it. It was an outhouse.

"I came out this morning to take a leak," explained Grant. "I heard it in there clawing at the wall, and luckily I hadn't opened the door yet."

"We're going to kill it?"

"That's right. Why don't you stand over there," he pointed to the side of the outhouse. "And open the door for me. Then I'll shoot it."

Lou stepped over to the side wall of the outhouse and reached over to the door. "You're sure this is safe?"

"Of course. Done it plenty of times before."

"Okay then . . . are you ready?"

"Ready."

Lou opened up the door and a zombie came stumbling out. It began to ooze blood as the sunlight hit its skin. Grant put the monster out of its misery with a single shotgun blast.

"That's all there is to it. Why don't you go inside and see if my daughter's done with breakfast, I'll be in shortly."

Grant pulled the zombie's corpse, which was laying on its back with its limbs splayed out like a turtle, away from the outhouse and stepped inside. He closed the door to urinate.

Lou put the sword away and went back into the house. Merriweather was in the kitchen, preparing eggs.

"Is the zombie dead?" she called to him.

"Yeah. Your dad shot it."

She came walking out with a plate and handed it to Lou. "My Pa is a brave man. He's getting older though, I've had to start helping him with the zombies that don't leave when morning comes. Thank you for helping him, Lou." She kissed him on the cheek. It was a nice gesture, but Lou felt no attraction to blocky people like Merriweather, no matter how sweet of a girl she was.

Grant stepped through the front door. "Breakfast ready yet, love?"

"Yes Pa. Your plate is on the table."

"Why don't you bring it to me." He took a seat in the wicker chair next to Lou. "Thanks for the help this morning, friend."

"Don't mention it."

"Have you remembered where you came from yet? The night of sleep help at all?"

"Oh. No, it didn't."

"That's a shame. Any idea what you'll do now? You're welcome to stay with us another night if you'd like."

Lou put his plate on the coffee table. "No, no. I'll be on my way."

"Where ya gonna go?"

"I'm not really sure. There's a road leading away from your house, I figured I would follow it."

"You're leaving us?" Merriweather said from the kitchen doorway. "It's not safe out there, Lou. You shouldn't go."

"Now love," said Grant. "If Lou wants to leave, he can leave. He's his own man." He turned back to Lou. "If you follow that road for a day, you'll reach Quad. It's a town with a couple dozen people living there. _Much _safer than my little farmhouse. If you decide to leave, I want you to take the sword with you. A gift from me to you, friend."

"Thanks Grant. Means a lot."

"Anytime. But if you're leaving for Quad, you should get moving fast. It's a long walk and you don't want to get caught outside when night falls."

"Right," Lou got up. The three of them went outside and stood at the beginning of the road. It was a shallow path, cutting down into the reddish dirt to reveal a light-colored layer beneath. Dead shrubs and a few cactuses bordered the road for its entirety.

"Good luck out there, Lou," said Merriweather. "Don't get caught outside after dark."

"What should I do if the sun sets?"

"Go somewhere high up. Hide if you can, but not in any caves. Those are where the zombies stay."

"Thanks for the advice." He extended a hand for Grant to shake, then another for Merriweather. And he set off down the road. Grant and Merriweather watched him shrink as he grew more distant.

"Do you think he'll be okay?" the girl asked her father.

"I've always been an optimist, dear. He'll at least reach a watchtower before dusk. If he's smart enough he'll spend the night in one."

Lou was a speck now, a black dot against the red, brown, and beige hues of the road and the dirt surrounding it. He did not return to Grant and Merriweather for a long time.


	2. The Road to Quad

**CHAPTER TWO: THE ROAD TO QUAD**

He figured he must be losing his mind. It was the only explanation for being in Manhattan one day, and Blockland the next. Lou didn't know if insanity really could trick people into thinking they were somewhere else, but he knew there was no way he'd suddenly been transported to a land of connectable bricks. That simply made no sense in the worldview of modern science. He knew as little about psychiatry as the rest of the universe, but he knew for sure that books and movies portrayed mentally disturbed characters slipping away to fantasy worlds from time to time. And that was the only way he could explain his situation.

Grant's house was miles behind, and Lou's feet were tired. He grew thirsty. As the dirt road seemed to stretch longer and longer, he realized he should have asked Grant for some water and food for the journey. Even better, he should have asked Merriweather. Her father was hospitable, but she took caretaking to a whole new level. Preparing meals and washing the dishes were expected of her in that household, and she had been the one to originally suggest Lou spend the night there. He understood why her father called her dear so often—she was a nice girl.

Lou stopped at a small pond. It was nestled into the base of a mesa, jutting out of the ground parallel to the road. The pond water was brown, so Lou didn't intend to drink it, and yet he didn't dare leave. The pond reflected his image back to him, giving him his first look at himself as a blockhead. He had a six-sided torso in the shape of a rectangular prism, with the long sides pointing up. His head, an angular cube, sat atop the torso with a pair of shoulders beneath it. His hands were at his sides, and his feet were stuck to the ground.

And his body seemed to be made of plastic, like the rest of this world.

He fell back onto the solid ground and felt hopeless for a little while until he recalled night grew closer with each passing moment. Lou was feeling bad for himself, but he had yet to become suicidal, and he did not want to die at the hands of bloodthirsty zombies. So he got up and pressed onward down the road, and not long later, he was rewarded for not giving up. A thinly-leaved tree grew out of the red-brown soil, next to the mesa Lou had been walking along for the past ten minutes. The tree bore two orange fruits on its lowest branches, and Lou wasted no time grabbing and eating them. He was hungry enough to eat both, and it did him well. He felt full, with a renewed sense of motivation to continue down the road.

After the mesa ended in a dangerous slope meeting the ground, a dark gray picket fence began to run alongside the road. It was another plot of farmland, like Grant's, although owned by someone else. Lou peered over the fence into the land beyond, surprised to see small patches of green grass sprouting out of the ground. It was by no means a lush forest—grass was the sole vegetation beyond the fence, and it grew only in tiny clusters. Horses and cows were scattered sparsely across the land, lethargically feeding on the grass.

Lou paid little attention to where he was going as he walked along the fence. He tripped over a pumpkin in his path and fell face-first into the hard ground. He swore in pain.

When he got up he realized the pumpkin had a face carved into it. It resembled the faces of the zombies, with two sunken, lifeless eyes and that horrible gaping mouth. It startled Lou, and he scooted backward across the ground to get away from it. He felt utterly ridiculous when he realized he was thrown into a panic by a pumpkin, and got to his feet to keep walking.

Up the road Lou spotted a dot growing closer. He squinted his eyes and focused until its shape became familiar. It was a car, and it was speeding right at him. He sidestepped off the road and watched it come closer. The driver slowed to a stop right next to Lou and hopped out.

"Hey there mate," said the driver. He had a gruff voice. "Out for a stroll?"

"Uh . . . I guess. I'm headed for Quad."

"Quad? You making any stops?"

"I wasn't planning on it. Who are you?"

"Ah shit, I forgot my manners. My name's Argus Pearl, but you can call me Argus. You got a name?"

"Lou."

"Lou! Lovely name. You said you didn't intend to stop?"

"Well, I will if I have to. But I was told I can get to Quad in a day."

"If you sprint, maybe. You'll never get there by walking though. I could give ya a lift if you prefer not to be eaten by zombies."

Lou looked over Argus's shoulder. He had arrived in a dark green Jeep, with a bent up antenna and bags in the back seat. "You'll take me to Quad?"

"Well I ain't gonna leave you out here where the zombies can get you."

Lou nodded. It was a good idea. "Okay. Thank you."

"Marvelous, hop in."

Argus got into the driver's seat while Lou got in on the passenger side. The driver pulled off the road, turned around, and got back on, driving in the direction of Quad. The cacti in this desert seemed to be separated by miles each, but in the Jeep they zoomed by as frequent green blurs. Small bricks in the road were kicked up by the Jeep and sent flying into the air behind them.

Argus sparked a conversation. "Where ya from Lou?"

"To tell you the truth, Mr. Pearl, I don't know. I—"

"Whoa there! Don't call me Mr. Pearl, mate. That was my great grandfather's name. Me, my dad, and his dad have all been Argus."

"Oh. Sorry Argus."

"Don't worry about it. Where were you saying you were from?"

"I don't know. I woke up yesterday in a cornfield, and that was the first memory I have of Blockland. I can't remember being here before that."

"Sounds like a wicked case of amnesia. What made you decide to go to Quad?"

"It's the closest town. I'm just going there to get away from the zombies."

"That's a good enough reason. I'm a zombie hunter myself, I know how bad it can get."

"You're a zombie hunter?"

"Hell yeah. It's a solitary life, one only a person bred for action can handle." He grinned. "But it pays well, people love me for it, and I get to watch the sun set every night. It's also why I carry this name—my dad and granddad were both zombie hunters like me."

"Zombies are a big problem then?"

"Of course! You really do have some amnesia there, don't ya? You don't even remember how bad the zombies are out here."

Argus began to slow down. Lou had been looking to the right for the last few minutes, watching the desert pass by, but now he shifted his gaze to see why they were stopping. A watchtower stood next to the road, reaching so high into the sky it might as well have been a skewer to catch the sun with. The top of it angled out into a flat landing, enclosed by medieval parapets.

"We'll stay here for the night," Argus said, getting out of the car. "Well come along, now. Night falls faster than you'd think."

Lou got out of the car and looked at the horizon. It looked like a painter's palette had been knocked over, and the spilled paints were beginning to blend together into a colorful piece of abstract art. The abstract painting would soon be swallowed up by indigo paints, and night would fall as it had the day before, letting the zombies of Blockland roam free.

Argus stood by the door inside the watchtower and closed it once Lou had stepped through. The zombie hunter picked up a couple long bricks from the corner and stacked them atop each other in front of the door as a barricade.

"It's not the coziest place," he said. "But it's safer than any house around here, I'll tell ya that much."

"You don't say." Lou was looking at a wall with weapons fastened to it. A shotgun and two rifles comprised the small arsenal, opposite of a wall with cabinets full of food, and adjacent to a wall with a sofa against it. There was a ladder next to the sofa, leading up dozens of feet to the top floor of the tower.

"Eyeballing the upstairs?" Argus said. "Come on, let's have a look." He approached the ladder and took hold of the rungs, beginning to climb up. Lou didn't like the look of the ladder—it ascended the wall with nothing beneath it to catch a fallen climber, except for the ground floor. Falling off near the top would result in a long descent, which would undoubtedly end in death, or multiple broken bones at the least.

He followed Argus nonetheless.

The ladder was topped off by a hatch to the top floor. Argus threw it open and climbed out, then helped Lou up. The top floor was open to the outside air, which was chillingly cold out here in the desert when dusk came. Another watchtower was visible way, _way _out. And so was another in the opposite direction. They must have formed a loose barrier around the populous towns, with each tower manned by a single zombie hunter to keep the undead hordes from getting past.

Fire flashed behind Lou. He swung around, startled, to see Argus had ignited the tower's flame beacon at the heart of the floor. A broad brick, emanating orange light, spat a column of fire as tall as Lou up into the sky.

"Lou, take a look at this." Argus stood between parapets. He pointed at a mesa. The mesa had an overhang reaching into the air, and beneath it was a horde of twenty or thirty zombies. They were piled up, but as darkness fell across the landscape, the horde diffused and began to spread out into the night.

"The other towers can't see that cluster, we'll need to thin it out ourselves. You wanna come?"

Lou frowned. "Not at all, actually."

Argus was opening up the hatch and getting ready to descend the ladder. "You sure? I can give you a rifle. They're slow, too."

"I really don't want to, Argus. Sorry."

"Alright then." He disappeared down the ladder. "Leave me to kill all eighty of 'em myself. After I let you stay the night here, too."

"There's not eighty," Lou protested, and looked down the ladder shaft. "There's like, twenty. Twenty-five maybe."

"Don't try to persuade me to stay, Lou. I'll take care of 'em myself."

"Aw damn. I'll come."

Argus stopped near the bottom and looked up. "That's the spirit. Come on down now, we haven't got all night."

Lou exhaled, thinking he may be making a mistake, and started down the ladder. Argus stood at the bottom with a rifle in-hand. "Only the best," he said, and tossed it to Lou as he got off. Then he pulled out a shotgun, the same model as the one Grant used to kill the zombie in the outhouse, and started for the exit.

He opened up the door and walked out, looking left and right to spot any zombies that may have closed in on the watchtower. The area was clear, so he walked over to the Jeep with Lou following. They got in, and Argus started off into the desert. The subtle dunes of the land rocked them gently as the watchtower fell away behind sandy hills. The mesa got closer and closer, until they crested a dune and saw the zombie horde below. Many of the creatures were still piled up beneath the overhang, but a sizeable chunk of them had crawled free and now strode around directionless.

"This'll be easier than I thought," Argus yelled. He didn't need to raise his voice, the Jeep engine was silent, but he did it anyway. And it alerted the zombies beneath them of their presence. Judging from the smile that crossed Argus's face, he seemed to have gotten their attention on purpose.

The zombies began to shamble toward the dune in the dead black of night. They rasped and growled on their approach, but once they hit the slope of the dune, were all reduced to an infantile crawl that yielded no ground. Argus stood up in his seat to watch them form a pile below.

"What are you waiting for?" Lou asked. He turned around and scanned their surroundings for zombies that might sneak up on them. It was easy to miss movement out here in the desert, with no moon or civilization for light, save Argus's watchtower two miles away.

"You'll see."

The pile of zombies underneath the overhang wormed itself apart, and they joined the rest of the zombies in a new pile at the base of the dune. There was now a roadblock of the living dead at the bottom of the slope, perfectly lined up with the front of the Jeep. Argus sat back down.

"And we're off."

He accelerated down the dune and cut through the middle of the pile. The zombies were trampled under the car tires, many of them killed instantly and others wounded to the point that they could only crawl. Argus pulled the car underneath the overhang and stopped with it next to the mesa wall. He jumped out, brandishing the shotgun.

"Well don't sit there, Lou! Fire!" he said, then blasted the pile of zombies as they struggled to turn around and chase their prey—only, with Argus onsite, _they_ were the prey. And they had no hope of ever elevating their status to that of a predator. Lou fired two shots from his rifle, with only one being a hit, before the horde was finished. The pile of corpses sat motionless after it was all done.

Argus stood watching the pile of bodies for a moment, breathing heavily. "Told you it wasn't that bad!" he said and spun around. A white smile was the most visible feature in the darkness. To see the man get so much joy from killing zombies frightened Lou.

"I guess you were right."

"They all say that." Argus got back in the car. "Now let's head back to the tower. The gunfire will have attracted zombies from miles around, and I'm a little tuckered out after that slaughter."

They drove back to the watchtower and walked in the front door. Argus replaced the long barricade bricks in front of the entrance, and they were secure once again.

"What are the sleeping arrangements?" Lou asked.

"You can have the sofa. I'll be upstairs."

"You're sleeping outside?"

"Oh yeah. The crackle of the flame beacon sends me off to sleep real easy." He walked over to an end table next to the sofa. It had a little black device sitting on it. "Don't bust my balls too much, Lou. You'll get ambience too." He switched the device on, and the room was filled with a resounding bass riff. It looped every seven and a half seconds, so Lou expected he would have to turn it off after Argus went upstairs to keep from going insane from the repetition.

"_Bass 3_," Argus said, closing his eyes and nodding his head to the beat. He exhaled. "You'll need to keep that on all night. The sounds of the dead outside will drive you mad if you don't." He switched the light off. "Night." And he was gone up the ladder.

Lou did not like Argus. The man had to be a sociopath, if such a disorder even existed in blockheads. He almost seemed to take delight in the zombie massacre, and right from the very moment he met Lou he exuded an air of excessive excitement, like a kid just beginning puberty who got pleasure from being obnoxious and violent. And sleeping outside was the strangest part of it all—he said Lou would need music to drown out the sounds of the undead on the other side of the wall, yet he was sleeping on the roof, where the crackling of the beacon would not be enough to beat the growling below.

Perhaps Argus _enjoyed _the mindless sounds of the zombies. Perhaps he had made it a point to yell and shoot his shotgun back at the mesa, so that they may attract as many zombies to the tower as possible when it came time to sleep. Perhaps the undead growls were like a lullabyto him, and the slaughter entertainment.

Lou scared himself with those thoughts. He slept poorly for the second night in a row.

• • •

"Fuck! _Fuck!_ Motherfuckers!"

The obscenities were Lou's alarm clock. They came blasting through the walls of the tower from outside, and put him into a panic.

"This is some bullshit!" came another shout.

Lou got out of bed. It was Argus outside yelling. He must have snuck past Lou that morning, during the few minutes of shut-eye he was able to obtain. The thought of Argus stealthily getting past Lou scared him, especially as the events of the previous night crawled back to him.

Frantic, and with Argus's swearing continuing, Lou ran to the wall and grabbed the rifle he used the night before. He opened up the front door of the tower and looked around to see if zombies were the source of his host's distress, but saw none. Argus was far up the road, standing next to the charred remains of his car. Its chassis was the only thing left, overturned and covered in soot.

"Argus?" Lou called. "Are you okay?"

"No I'm not fucking okay! The zombies wrecked the Argo. Fucking _blew it up!_"

That revealed so much to Lou: The zombies were capable of serious destruction in large numbers; and, embarrassingly, Argus called his Jeep the Argo. Lou stood, speechless, watching the zombie hunter lament the loss of his vehicle. When he didn't respond, Argus broke the silence to rant further.

"They must've came in the middle of the night, after I dozed off. Fuckin' buggers! Do you have any idea how much the Argo cost me? It had a custom suspension, new tires, and was made from reinforced plastic! Do you have _any _idea?" He jerked his head around to look at Lou. "_Do you!_"

". . . no."

"_Fuck!_" Argus sat down on the ground. "Well Lou, looks like you're walking to Quad. The zombies really fucked us over, mate."

"That's okay." He stepped back into the tower and set the rifle down. "Uh, can you tell me how to get there? By foot?"

Argus nodded, but didn't look up. He stared at the ruined car. "Just walk that way." He thrusted a thumb over his shoulder. "Quad's a half day from here. You'll get there safe."

Lou nodded. "Alright then. Thanks for, uh, letting me stay here." He walked past the zombie hunter, whose response was curt.

"No," he sighed, "problem."

And Lou left Argus there, a broken man in the middle of a dirt road, watching his dead car stay dead. It would be a while until someone came to help Argus out, but he would be fine. A deep hatred for zombies manifested in him, though. Deeper than before. He would not stop hunting until the world was ridden of the undead.


	3. Coming of Age

**CHAPTER THREE: COMING OF AGE**

"I quite like this one, Father." Princess Valance pointed at the pastel pink dress. "Isn't it precious? What do you think?"

King Valance glanced at it, then shook his head. "No soft colors. I thought I told the tailors that before they made the dresses."

"Why no soft colors? It's a darling dress."

"No soft colors, period. The Valance family has worn bold colors for generations because we are bold in nature. Soft colors reflect weakness." He pointed at another dress. "_That _is a dress worthy of a Valance body."

The two of them stood before a raised platform, which was decorated with three rows of dresses in an array colors. King Valance was pointing at a dark red outfit, with orange lining at the bottom of it.

"It reminds me of a fire," he said. "Fierce orange topped off by wavering crimson, crimson with a bloodlust. The flame that warns those in its path of a Valance on approach."

"I don't know if I like it, Father."

"Well you are not getting the pink one. Choose something else."

She frowned and looked down the first row. There were no good outfits in it, so she looked at the second row. The only remarkable dress in the second row was the one her father seemed to be enamored of. And the third row was host to the pink dress she was forbidden from having.

"You're right Father. The red one will work."

"Of course it will." He turned to face the royal hands behind them. A pair of older women stood at attention, eager to please the family. "You two, take my daughter and help her into the dress. See her to the balcony when you're finished," he told them. "And be quick about it."

"Yes, Your Majesty," they said and bowed their heads. They rushed to get the dress and herd Princess Valance to a mirror in the corner of the room. King Valance was pleased by their swiftness, and stepped out of the room. He walked down the hall to the royal bedroom, where he lay his head every night for slumber, and found an imperial guard there. The guard wore the trademark silver armor of the Chrome Empire, which King Valance reigned over, and brandished a gray spear. The spear was mostly ceremonial—it could be used in battle, sure, but it was an awkward weapon compared to the pistol the guard had hidden in his inventory.

"Your Majesty," the guard said, and bowed. "The people await you."

"What are their numbers?"

"In the thousands, no doubt."

"Excellent," Valance said, and strode from the entrance of the bedroom to another set of doors, these ones transparent. They swung open and led out onto a pure white balcony, with a low banister running along its edge. The balcony was a semicircle, extending away from the royal bedroom like a spotless dinner plate cut down the middle.

From the balcony, King Valance could see thousands of blockheads standing in the marketplace below. He looked down at their numbers, knowing they were all his subjects and existed to serve his empire. And they looked up at him, a powerful monarch standing in front of his grand castle. The building was massive—hundreds of thousands of bricks, most of them silver or white, and adorned in the windows with rosy curtains. It was the unmistakable dwelling of the Valance family, which had ruled the Chrome Empire for as long as any historian knew.

At the sight of King Valance emerging onto the balcony, the marketplace erupted into a festive roar. The thousands of blockheads below began to cry out in reverence for their king, clapping and shouting and holding up their beverages. Whether or not they liked him was irrelevant—they could be an empire of rebels and would still show loyalty, knowing the king could have them all systematically executed in the span of a month or less.

The king raised a hand for silence so that he may speak. The immense crowd below died down from an ocean's worth of crashing voices to the sound of a lapping tidal pool. They gave him their attention, eager to hear his latest address.

"My people," he began. "Thank you for all coming out today. Seeing so many commoners in one place reminds me how faithful and strong this empire is. With you as our workers, I as our leader, and the Golden Brick as our guide through this frightening and uncertain world, the Chrome Empire shall surely be as timeless as the land it was built upon." His opening was met with an interlude of applause. "And as you all know," he continued, "this land _is_ rightfully ours. Yet there are creatures of the night, unholy creatures indeed, that we must face each day to hold the empire together. _Zombies._" The mere mention of the word garnered disgusted shouts from the masses below. "Please, please," the king said. "Your hatred is not misplaced, but I must continue. Our scientists have been hard at work devising new measures of defense against the undead menace. Today, you will see the newest weapons the royal army shall wield."

King Valance gave a discreet hand signal at his side, cuing the next scene in the address. Soldiers poured out of the castle doors below, taking up formation beneath the balcony so that the marketplace could see the empire's new armed forces. A few soldiers trotted out onto the balcony as well, standing in stoic silence next to their ruler. The soldiers were all armed with futuristic weapons, with their white and light blue color schemes that implied purification of an unclean land.

"Today!" King Valance roared. "Today is the beginning of a new era, one where zombies shall no longer decimate towns and leave the inhabitants of the countryside living in fear. Today marks the beginning of a time where the zombies shall be justly _cut down _by the dozens, by the hundreds, until their numbers are no more! Today," the soldiers clicked their weapons, "is the beginning," they pointed their weapons at the sky, "of the era of the _laser!_"

The soldiers on the ground below, as well as the ones standing next to King Valance, fired their laser rifles into the sky. The weapons weren't noisy. They discharged with crackling hisses that hinted at the complex electronics within. The spectacle excited the citizens, and they boomed with joy louder than before. The zombies, a seemingly endless threat, were now surely doomed.

During the lull in the speech, King Valance looked back into the royal bedroom. His daughter stood there in the dark red dress they had selected, watching quietly. He waved her forward, and she began a reluctant walk out onto the balcony. She was frowning.

King Valance rushed to meet her before the masses saw her expression. "Smile, damn it." He placed a hand on her back and straightened her out. "Do not slouch either." The two of them walked up to the head of the balcony, and the crowd quieted down.

"And on a more romantic note," he told them. "My daughter, Princess Valance, is now of age to begin searching for a husband. The Golden Brick knows I shan't live forever, and the throne needs an heir. So, residents of the Chrome Empire, I invite you all to behave as excellently as possible. Perhaps my lovely daughter shall be wooed by one of you."

None of them would marry her. None of them had a chance. King Valance would be the one to choose her husband, bringing in wealthy, royal bachelors from neighboring kingdoms and free cities and choosing from the lot of them.

The masses clapped as the king and the princess retreated to the royal bedroom, finished with the address. The soldiers on the balcony left the room, and the royal family was alone.

"You slouched," said King Valance.

"I tried not to."

"And this dress," he walked in a circle around her. "Have mercy on my soul. It is entirely unflattering on you."

"It is?"

"Did you even look in the mirror? Your rear is as flat as the Undulo Wastes aren't." He shook his head. "Our lineage will surely end with you."

"Father!" she cried. "_You're _the one who chose this dress."

He struck her in the side of the head. "Do not raise your voice to me," he said as she hit the floor. She tried to rise up but he kept her down with a foot. "My daughter, sometimes I think you're forgetting your place in this family. I am the king, you are the princess." He took his foot off her. "Now darling, you know I love you."

She sniffled. "Yes Father."

"You know I do what I must to raise you correctly."

She nodded, but kept her eyes on the floor before her. "Yes Father."

"But sometimes you step out of line, and that can't be tolerated."

"Yes Father. I understand."

"Good. Now get up, you're royalty. You can't lounge around the floor like that."

She stood up, revealing scuffs on the front of her dress, but did not dare face her father. She avoided eye contact altogether, knowing the king placed great personal emphasis on the balance between submission and power. To look him in the eyes after the exchange would be disrespectful. It was a philosophy he employed in his ruling policies as well as family tradition.

There was a knock at the door. King Valance called for the person outside to come in.

"Sir?" an imperial guard said, opening up the door and sticking his head inside. "Everything okay in here?"

"Of course. Please tell me you came with more to offer than _that._"

"Yes, Your Majesty. The diplomats from the Free City of Relifour are here."

"Oh, excellent," the king said and broke off into a brisk walk. "Show the princess back to her room, please."

"Yes sir." The guard sidestepped for the king to move past, then entered the room. He walked over to Princess Valance and stood straight with discipline. "My lady."

She turned in his direction, but hid her face. "Take me."

They walked out of the bedroom and started for Princess Valance's chamber. She would cry in there, and feel utterly useless, and think sad thoughts. She doubted her ability as a queen-to-be, doubted her ability as a now-princess, and doubted her general worth as a person. Her father blamed her for too much, and it weighed too heavy on her conscience.

But relief would come soon enough.


	4. Watering Hole

**CHAPTER FOUR: WATERING HOLE**

The sun was at its apex and Quad was in sight. The town lay at the end of the road, just past a gray fortress—a checkpoint for the city watch. The stout fort was nowhere near as imposing as Argus's watchtower, which yielded a view of the land for miles around. But Lou knew better than to underestimate the building. Blockland was a strange place, and size didn't necessarily denote how dangerous something was. He would take no risks.

"Hello?" Lou shouted at the fort. "Anyone there?"

The fort was motionless for a moment. Then a face appeared in one of its windows. "Hey!" the face barked. "Don't move! Stay there!"

A door next to the road swung open, and four men armed with spears and pistols ran out of the fort in Lou's direction. They weren't pointing the weapons at him, but it scared him nonetheless.

"Whoa!" Lou backed away.

"Don't move!"

The armed men formed a circle around him. They scanned his body with their eyes, inspecting every inch.

"Are you scratched?" one of them asked.

"Scratched?"

"By a zombie. Are you?"

"No," said Lou. "No scratches."

"Alright. Looks like he's clean, boys." The men turned and started back for the fort, except for one, who remained next to Lou. "Sorry about that, stranger. We don't want to let any zombies in, or else the king will crack down again." He shrugged. "You know, gotta observe the formalities."

"Oh, right. Of course."

The man joined the rest of the soldiers and returned to the fort. Lou realized he still had Grant's sword on him, and that he could have made an attempt to defend himself. Obviously, in that situation, it was better to just comply and let the city watchmen check him for scratches. But in the future he might need to draw his weapon more quickly. It could be life or death.

He continued into Quad. It was a modest place, with dirt roads just like the countryside, and no buildings more than two stories tall. There were residences at the edge of the town, and a commercial district at the center. Most of the storefronts sold general goods, but some specialized in produce, and some specialized in construction materials. The construction shops intrigued Lou the most. Their inventory consisted of blocks, with different sections devoted to flats, rounds, and full bricks. They displayed particularly useful blocks in the windows to attract customers.

After some walking, Lou came to the town's only bar: the Watering Hole. It had dark blue exterior walls, interrupted only by vertical gray stripes where the windows sat. Inside he could see some red booths, televisions attached to the ceilings, and a bar. It was a familiar sight to him, one he took comfort in.

There were seven patrons and one bartender inside. Lou knew this because they all stared at him the moment he walked in. They were fascinated by his face—it was one they had never seen around here. Evidently Quad didn't get many tourists.

He stood still in the entryway until they moved back to their conversations. It was an awkward first impression, no doubt, but Lou tried not to let it bother him. He stepped into view of the TVs above the bar and saw they displayed a large white castle onscreen. The castle had a balcony, which a king and a princess stood on. The camera zoomed in on the princess, granting a wide view of her upper body. Someone in the bar whistled at her.

"Hey," came a voice from behind Lou. He turned and saw a man and a woman standing by one of the windows. The woman was waving him over. "You're not from here are you?"

"No," he said. "I'm new in town."

"Well welcome to Quad, stranger. I'm Nikki," she said, and pointed to the man next to her. "This is Provo. And you are?"

"Lou."

"Pleasure to meet you Lou. What brings you to our town?"

"Nothing really. I just wanted to get away from the zombies."

"Does that mean you're a farmer?" Farmers were the only people who had trouble with zombies. Towns had the city watch to protect them, which Lou discovered when he first entered Quad. Farmers, on the other hand, fended for themselves. They had no one, just themselves and whatever family was willing to help.

"No, but I lived with one for a day. It was enough to make me come here."

Nikki and Provo exchanged looks. They cracked up.

"That's funny," said Provo. "You're a funny guy. You think you'll be staying in Quad for very long?"

He shrugged. "I don't know."

"Well, it's not a bad place. The Empire doesn't show up out here, if you don't like it much." He gestured to the television. "What do you think of him anyway? The king."

Lou looked up at the screen. The king, who seemed to rule this land judging from Provo's comment, wore white shoulder pads and a cape. His torso was covered by a diagonal belt strap overtop silver scale mail. He was the personification of regality.

"He looks like a douche."

The two of them laughed. "Shit Lou, you really are funny. Let me buy you a drink." Provo looked past him and waved to the bartender. Nikki picked up the conversation.

"What do you think of his policies?"

"To be honest, I don't know anything about them."

"I bet you know _something._"

"Nope."

"Really? You don't know anything about the king?"

Lou shook his head.

"Well . . . damn. That might be for the better. Ignorance is bliss after all."

"Why? What's wrong with him?"

"You really don't know the stuff he's done?" Provo asked, handing him a drink. "What nation are you from?"

Lou lied, "This one."

"Well, let me clue you in. See those fancy guns on TV?"

He looked up and saw a unit of soldiers onscreen, armed with futuristic-looking guns.

"Yeah."

"They funded those weapons by taxing the farmers. The farmers, of all people."

"That's not even the worst thing the king has done," said Nikki. "A couple years back, some zombies totally invaded a town not far from here. The citizens were all boarded up in their homes. The city watch had to call the capital requesting help. But the king didn't send any troops because it would have been too costly. Can you believe that?"

"And then there's what he did to poor old Grant," Provo added.

"Grant?" Lou said. "What happened to Grant?"

"Well, one year he had trouble paying his taxes. I guess _that's _worth sending troops to take care of, because that's what the king did. He sent imperial guards to Grant's farm and executed one of the man's daughters to show everyone what happens when you don't pay the Empire. I guess it worked, since no one has missed their taxes since then, but hell."

Information in Lou's head connected. The night he stayed at Grant's home, he had gone upstairs and seen two pink doors. One belonged to Merriweather, but he didn't know who owned the other one, and didn't give it any thought at the time. But now he knew—Grant had another daughter, who was killed by what Lou now perceived as a tyrannical government.

"Well fuck the king," he said.

"A lot of people out here feel that way." Provo waved to the bartender for another round of drinks. "Can't say that in the core cities though. They'll think you're an insurgent and imprison you. _Are _you an insurgent?"

"No." He didn't even know insurgents existed in Blockland.

"Might wanna keep it that way. The monarchy sucks, but fighting against it is hopeless."

• • •

They got drunk as the night went on. It was to be expected, of course. They were a bunch of plastic blockheads in a bar—it was normal to Nikki and Provo, but the whole scene screamed _Be carefree! _to Lou. He didn't know when he would get home, but Blockland wasn't a horrible place, so he figured there was no harm in enjoying himself while here.

They were soon kicked out of the bar, not because it was closing time, but because they were just getting too noisy. Lou made his two new friends laugh loudly enough to disturb the other patrons, so the bartender removed them peacefully and they set off for a new destination: Provo and Nikki's house. The two lived together, but weren't very physical with one another at the bar, so Lou didn't fully understand if their relationship was romantic or platonic. But they had some killer music at their home, he knew that for sure. Provo called the song, an electronic dance tune, _Stress_. The three of them sat in chairs and sofas in the living room, still inebriated.

"You got any hobbies?" Nikki asked Lou.

"I used to paint."

"You don't anymore?"

"Well, I still do, but not for a few days. Don't know if I ever will again."

"Don't stop painting. That's a good talent to have. The ladies will love it." She looked at Provo. "He painted me stuff when we first met."

"She's right," he nodded. "None of it was good. It was all very bad, in fact."

"Oh, but I liked it all anyway. Because it was from you."

He grinned and humbly waved the kind words away. Nikki, with her uncertain feet testing out different spots on the floor, stood up. She walked over to Provo and gave him a sloppy kiss. The kissing evolved into them running up the stairs without warning Lou of their plans for the night.

So they were romantic partners, he decided.

Lou didn't like to snoop. But in his drunken mindset, he decided to open up a drawer beneath the room's television set and see what was inside. He discovered a map depicting all of Blockland, with broad swaths of land and ocean. It was a vast realm, with an immense desert, a frozen arctic, grasslands, forests, and a variety landforms he didn't understand how to interpret. The locations that puzzled him the most were labelled as the Sky Isles, the Undulo Wastes, and a sizeable chunk of the world was simply Darkness. Had he been sober, he may have been able to guess what these oddly named lands entailed. But he wasn't. His eyes were tripping over their own retinas in an attempt to stay focused.

He dozed off in an alcohol-fueled slumber. He would awake with a strong hangover.

• • •

"Lou," said Provo. He jostled him awake. Lou yawned.

"What time is it?"

"Time to get up. Morning's here."

Lou got to his feet. _Stress _was still playing from the nearby music brick, but Provo silenced it. Lou realized how much the music had been hurting his head. He was hung-over.

"Last night was fun," Provo said.

"It was. Where's Nikki?"

"Still sleeping." Provo stepped into the kitchen. "Can I get you coffee?"

"No, I need to get going."

He appeared in the doorway. "Where to?"

"The capital, I guess." It was the place on the map that stood out the most to Lou. The capital of the Chrome Empire, fittingly named Chrome Capital, was an unabated metropolis. It had shopping districts the size of Quad, and parks equivalent in size to forests back where Lou came from. And while the most advanced technology out here came in the form of televisions, he knew the soldiers in the capital had access to laser weapons. Who knew what other tech was available in the capital—perhaps a ticket back to Lou's home?

Provo frowned. "I get the feeling you're looking for something, Lou. Are you?"

"Sort of. It's more complex than that though. Hard to explain."

He nodded. "Whatever you're looking for, I think you'll find it."

"Thanks." Lou went to the front door. "Tell Nikki goodbye for me."

"I will."

Lou left after that, but minutes later there was a knock at the door. Provo answered it, expecting Lou to have forgotten something. But it wasn't him. It was a tax collector.

Provo forgot they were coming through this week.

"Hi there. Provo?"

"That's me."

"Good day to you. I'm here to collect your taxes to the Chrome Empire. Do you have them handy?"

He thought about his earnings from the past few weeks and wondered if he had enough to pay the tax man. He did not make much money from his job, and a lot of cash was spent on alcohol the night before. Provo swallowed. "I think I'm a little short."

• • •

Lou was starting for the north road out of town when he met Talia for the first time. Sometimes the most grand of friendships begin with an unremarkable encounter, and that held true when the two of them met. He with his blue T. rex shirt and black pants, she with her pink hoodie and jeans.

She didn't get his attention with a hello or a hey, like most people would have. She waved to him as they both stepped onto the same dirt road, the only dirt road leading in the direction of the capital. A wave had a special quality to it—a certain amiability that was literally beyond words.

And he waved back to her.

"Hi," she said when they matched strides.

"Hi. I'm Lou."

"I'm Talia. Where are you headed?"

"Chrome Capital."

"Really?"

"Yeah."

"Me too."

Lou smiled, shifting his gaze to the path ahead of them. The desert was not as harsh here as it was on the road to Quad. Grass was sprouting without the aid of people, albeit very meagerly. But it was a hint of what was to come.

"Why are you going to the capital?" he asked her.

"My parents were tired of me playing _After School Special_. They told me to either cut it out or leave." She smiled. "I love music."

"I love painting."

Quad grew more distant from them. But they did not notice.

"Why are you going to the capital?" she asked him.

"Not sure."

It was the start of something beautiful. The musician and the painter side by side on a journey to the unknown. They not only had their respective venues of expression at their disposal, but they also had each other. And it would be that way until the day one of them died. That day could be tomorrow, that day could be seventy years from now, but it would always be too soon.


	5. Runaway Princess

**CHAPTER FIVE: RUNAWAY PRINCESS**

Princess Valance sat before a vanity, practicing her reading and writing. Her father was determined a little hard work was all anyone needed to turn them into an intelligent, disciplined person. That was how he was raised—his father did the same to him, and his father to he. So the princess was forced into the tradition, knowing she would have been excluded from it had her brother not died at birth.

That was one of the things the king blamed her for. He lost his wife and firstborn son in childbirth, and afterwards never tried to find a new partner. The princess did not blame him—all memories of her mother were sweet ones. Queen Valance was the most tender, loving woman in the world. No one could come close to matching her. But when the king lost her, he lost his source of affection too, and he became as bitter as the boque roots growing in one of the castle's courtyards. He searched for a scapegoat and found his daughter, who had absolutely nothing to do with the death of her mother and brother, but the king was full of resentment and needed someone to unleash it on.

Her homework for the night was repetitive. She would read a sentence, then write it out, then read another sentence, then write that one out. The king intended it to help her comprehension skills—if she was reading and writing sentences, surely she would begin to grasp the meanings of words and how they tied together. But that was not the case. The princess would copy down the individual shapes of letters, string them together and add spaces when necessary, and be done with it. She learned nothing. She rushed through the tedious work without retaining any of the knowledge her father hoped she would acquire.

At the age of twenty, this would only hurt her.

The king opened the door to her bedroom. "My darling, you're excused from your work for tonight. I would like you to come downstairs and join me in a meal with the Newarks of Relifour."

The Newarks were the ruling family of the Free City of Relifour, a colony of lasseiz faire capitalists to the east of the Chrome Empire. They made their fortune from just about every form of resource collection—mining, fishing, woodcutting, the list goes on. Relifese merchants were the wealthiest tradesmen in Blockland, known for their vast inventories of weapons, tools, foods, and bricks. Across the land, whole empires envied the economic prosperity of Relifour, which they all eclipsed in both land and population.

"I won't be punished if I don't finish my work?" she asked.

"No, dear. I'm not a monster."

She got out of her seat and approached the door. King Valance led her downstairs to the meeting hall, where a long wooden table sat surrounded by chairs. Both the table and its complementing chair army were crafted by the most skilled experts the royal family could find, and it was very obvious. The legs on each piece of furniture had more definition than the dictionary entry for 'take.'

The Newarks stood in a loose group by the entrance of the hall. There were four of them—a king, a queen, a prince, and a newborn daughter who could not yet speak. King Valance bowed to them with false humility. He felt they were ants compared to the power of the Chrome Empire, but knew better than to be arrogant.

"Newarks of Relifour," he said. "Thank you for coming to dinner. I don't think any of you have been introduced to my daughter yet." He gestured for her to step forth. "This is Princess Valance. Dear, this is King Newark, Queen Newark, their newborn daughter Paloma, and their son, Sir Beck."

She knew her father would spend the night verbally pushing her in Sir Beck's direction. He was both a prince and a knight—nobility and strategy rolled into one striking young man, a man her father admired already.

"Please, Newarks, be seated." King Valance stepped over to the head of the table and pulled out a chair for himself. A silver platter sat in the middle of the table, host to a couple wineglasses already filled halfway. "My chefs have prepared for us the finest of meals. Tell me, have any of you had tyrannosaurus before?"

"Tyrannosaurus?" said King Newark. "I thought they were too isolated for any hunters to find, let alone kill."

"You thought correctly. But the Chrome Empire is not a nation of people who accept defeat in the face of overwhelming odds." King Valance reached forth and plucked a goblet of wine from the platter. He sipped from it, adding a suspenseful pause to the conversation. "You see," he said, putting the wineglass down, "when a Valance wants something, they take it. And when I first learned the Newarks of Relifour desired trade with my empire, I wanted to show them a warm welcome—and food has always been the warmest form of welcome, in my opinion."

A door leading to the kitchen swung open at the other end of the hall. Servers in spotless white jackets came streaming out, carrying covered plates and bottles of wine. They placed the plates on the table and refilled King Valance's glass, then revealed the plates bore appetizers. The servers disappeared afterwards.

"Salad from the fields and shrimp from the sea," said the king. "All grown here in the Empire. Please, I insist, taste what my nation has to offer."

The Newarks accepted the appetizers, but their king did not lose his interest in the tyrannosaurus meat. Valance knew he wouldn't, too—he was prolonging the mystery of how he managed to obtain it.

"Delicious shrimp," said King Newark. "But it will not make me forget about the tyrannosaur. You must tell me more, King Valance."

"Of course." He clapped his hands. "Wolfe!"

A burly figure appeared in the entrance to the hall. He had messy hair, an unshaven face, and wore leather armor rich with the natural cologne of a man who didn't know what cologne was. The brute stepped further into the hall, until King Valance put a hand out to him.

"Far enough, Wolfe." He then spoke to King Newark, "Here's the hunter responsible for the death of the tyrannosaurus we will dine on. Wolfe led a party of twenty men into the Primordial Jungle, ordered not to come out until they killed a beast worthy of royal taste. Two weeks later, Wolfe and three surviving men dragged a dead dinosaur out using just their muscles and whatever rope they had with them."

"Golden Brick up above," exclaimed Newark. "I'll be damned if that isn't the greatest feat any hunter has ever achieved. You ought to be proud of yourself, Wolfe."

"Proud?" growled Wolfe. "I will not know such a feeling until I have been presented a challenge. A tyrannosaurus is no challenge."

"It isn't? You lost seventeen men, did you not?"

"I did. A tyrannosaurus is no challenge."

"Wolfe, please, please." King Valance stood up. "As riveting as your tales may be, we're preparing to feast, and your smell offends." He waved Wolfe away, and the hunter obeyed. "Newarks, if you will excuse me, I must speak to my daughter privately for a moment."

The princess had been filling up on wine and appetizers in silence. She was doing her absolute best to lay low and avoid any humiliations her father may have in store for her. That's why she was so surprised when he took her by the arm and escorted her out into the corridor, and once there, took it a step further and walked her out of earshot.

"What the unholy hell are you doing in there?" he fumed.

"Father?"

"Do not 'father' me. Why are you stuffing your face?" He grabbed her hands and groaned in disgust at the shrimp residue on them. He threw them down to her sides. "Do you wish to embarrass me in front of this family? Do you wish to remain unwed your whole life?"

"Father, I—"

"Silence. Sir Beck has been watching you since the moment I introduced you. For reasons beyond me, he seems intrigued. Do you even _know _what he has accomplished in his twenty years?"

"No."

"More than you have in yours. I would list his history for you, but the Newarks would miss us." He hunched down and got eye level with her. "Promise me you will behave better, love."

"Okay."

"Okay _what?_"

"I promise to not sit around stuffing my face."

"That's not all. I want you to talk—make him fall in love with your voice, laugh at what he says, and try not to sound dull. Promise."

"I promise."

"Then let us return."

The Valances went back to the meeting hall and took their seats. King Valance apologized for the short absence, and chalked it up to an urgent matter they forgot to take care of before the Newarks arrived. He put on a little show by telling them he usually runs his empire much more efficiently, and that this was the first time he ever had to walk out of a dinner to give orders, and then he laughed with them about it. And King Newark sympathized with him by sharing a story about how a warlock once attacked his castle while his in-laws were staying there, and that he had to discreetly battle it without his wife's parents finding out. And they laughed about that too.

Then the tyrannosaurus was brought out. Servers toted massive platters, as wide as the doorway they stepped through and requiring multiple people to carry. They placed the platters down before the two royal families and exposed the different choice cuts available—shank, ribs, tenderloin, and boiled cranium. The last item was literally the tyrannosaurus's head boiled in water, so that most of its facial features were preserved. Its eyelids had been cooked off though, and now it stared at them bug-eyed like it did when it saw Wolfe for the first time.

"You weren't lying," said King Newark. He eyeballed the meat in awe. "Valance, you perfect man! And that hunter of yours, my, what a monster he must be."

"I have seen him take down a giant before. Monster is an understatement."

"It must be!"

"Well, do please enjoy the meal. Don't serve yourself modestly—there's enough meat here to feed us for weeks."

They ate ferociously. Even Queen Newark, who went to great lengths to maintain a shapely figure, could not resist it. Princess Valance did not eat much though—she had filled up on shrimp, salad, and wine. Her father expected her to conjure up conversation, seeing as she wasn't eating, but she never did.

• • •

The princess lay in her bed. She wondered what life as a commoner was like—did the average girl her age have to put up with a horrible father? Were all fathers like hers? She knew they couldn't be—she had seen families in the marketplaces beneath the castle and knew many fathers treated their children excellently. So then why was her father so unfair to her?

She blamed herself, of course. Every time King Valance lost his temper, he would make sure to tell her how much he loved her afterwards, and that he was just doing his job as a father. It made her feel like her punishments were totally warranted because she was a troublesome daughter. And this time would be no different. King Valance opened up her door and spotted her on the bed. He shoved her off.

"I tried to be reasonable," he said, and delivered a kick into her side. "I asked you to behave better, and you promised you would."

"Father! Please!"

"Sir Beck probably thinks there's something wrong with you. The way you acted in there was ridiculous, do you know that? First you couldn't stop eating the appetizers, then you wouldn't touch the dinosaur. Your mouth did a lot of chewing but no talking." He kicked her again.

"I'm sorry!" she pleaded.

"And so am I." He sat down on the edge of her bed, looking down at his aching daughter. "I don't like hurting you, dear. I love you. I love you so much." He sighed. "I'm frustrated."

"I don't try to anger you." She coughed.

"I know. Pick yourself up so I can give you a kiss."

The princess collected herself and got to her feet. King Valance kissed her on the forehead and started for the door.

"Now go to bed," he told her. "The Newarks will be here for two more days. Try not to be any more foolish than you were tonight."

She nodded, and he left. She would be foolish by his standards again that very night. The foolishness began with her putting on new clothes, an outfit more casual than the one she was wearing. They were almost commoner clothes. Then she slipped her journal and a picture of her mother into her pockets, and was gone.

The next morning King Valance walked into her room and found the princess was missing. He would not tell the Newarks, and he would not tell the public. He told a tight-knit group of people he trusted very much, and requested they find her. He clearly told them failure was not an option, and that they must recover his daughter whether she was dead or alive, then prayed to the Golden Brick asking for her to be watched over.

• • •

It was one of the few times the princess had left the castle, and the only time she had ever been outside of its walls alone. Out here, walking among peasants and merchants and craftsmen, she got a feel for what common life really was. Scents drifted from stalls and tents and mingled with body odor and incense, and the resulting smell was mixed up by the hundreds of people passing through it. The atmosphere was fundamentally different than that of the castle overshadowing the marketplace. Where the halls of the castle were filled with deafening silence, the streets of the town beneath were filled with pleasing shouts and conversations fighting for dominance. It was very alive.

One shack in particular caught her attention. The sign on its roof labelled it a print shop, where people could go to have letters and numbers printed on bricks. The bricks could then be used as advertisements, signs, and so on. But this shack, which had no door, also seemed to be a residence. She could see mattresses on the floor inside, and a table where a man sat reading papers.

"Miss? You're in front of my door," said a young man behind her. She swung around and saw him standing there with a long block held over his shoulder.

"Sorry." She moved out of the way, but he kept staring at her.

"Princess?"

"Pardon?"

"Princess Valance!" He threw the brick aside and got on his knees. "I apologize, Princess. I didn't know it was you."

"It's fine, get up, please." She looked around, hoping no one would notice. The young man got to his feet.

"What brings you here? Do you need prints?"

"No."

"Reed?" the man inside the shack called out. "What are you doing out there?"

"Dad, you'll never believe it!"

The princess hushed him. "Please, I don't want anyone to know I'm here."

"Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't know. Would you like to come inside?"

She nodded, and they went in. The man at the table got up at the sight of the princess and looked ready to speak, but couldn't find any words.

"Princess," he said at last.

"Nice to meet you."

"Uh, where are my manners? I'm Klaus, my son is Reed. Is there anything we can do for you? Anything at all?"

"No thank you Klaus, I'm fine."

"Would you like some water?"

"No thank you. I'm just looking for a place to stay the night."

"Well Princess, you're more than welcome here. We couldn't turn down a royal."

She looked around. "Yes, I would appreciate it."

"I'll get started on dinner." He went into the next room.

Reed sat in a chair against the wall, next to an empty one. He invited her over, and she took a seat beside him. Their chairs were far weaker compared to the ones in the dining hall.

"Princess Valance, may I ask why you're here?" said Reed.

"Please don't call me that. Call me Melinda." Melinda was her first name, the same as her mother. "I'm here because I don't want to be royalty anymore."

"You don't?" he seemed amazed. "Why not?"

"Why would I want to be?"

Reed looked at her like she was speaking a different language. "Because you get to live in a castle, and you have all the food you want."

"It's not all that great."

Klaus came out a few minutes later with three servings of a modest dinner. He handed the princess a plate of salad with bread on the side, and though she wasn't very hungry, she ate anyway. Eating was her favorite form of escapism—whenever her father would get angry at her, she would sneak off afterwards and raid the kitchen. Having different tastes in her mouth distracted her from the hellish reality her father had created, and it made her feel warm inside. She could barely remember the hugs her mother gave her as a child, but the warmth of a post-beating meal reminded her of them.

Klaus's salad and bread did not taste very good though. The salad was old, not quite rotten, but definitely aged to the point where she couldn't stomach it. So she switched to the bread, which was hard as rock, but didn't taste horrible.

"Do you have a mother?" she asked Reed out of the blue.

"No, she passed away when I was young."

"So did mine."

Reed and the princess felt each other's pain. She connected with him for the first time there, and they would continue to grow closer over the next few weeks. She wouldn't know Klaus for long, his death was minutes away, but the man's hospitality was enough to make her think fondly of him for years to come. He had raised a good son.

"I bet you've seen a lot of plays," Klaus said. "With you being princess and all."

"Indeed I have. Have you?"

"No. Reed saw one last year though."

"Which one?"

"_Builder on the Roof_," Reed replied after forcing a chunk of bread down his throat.

Princess Valance gasped. "That's my favorite."

"Mine too. It's the only one I've ever seen, but it's my favorite."

"What was your favorite scene? I cried when the girl's boyfriend died in lava."

"That was definitely the best part. But I also liked the part in the field just before it."

The field scene was excellent. It was pure heartwarming bliss, where the protagonist and her boyfriend spent a whole day in a field picking flowers and picnicking. They slept there, too, and woke up the next morning knowing they were in love. Neither of them said it, they just _knew._ In the next act, however, the boyfriend died a grisly death in lava as the girl looked on in terror. She didn't try to save him either, because she was stricken with fear.

Princess Valance was similarly struck with fear a few moments later, when the front of the shack was torn away. The wall was there one moment and gone the next, ripped off and thrown like a shred of construction paper. All three of them screamed in surprise as Wolfe, the tyrannosaurus hunter, stood where the wall once was, surrounded by imperial guards.

"Princess, we're here to take you back to the castle," said a guard. "If you'd please step away from those men and come with us."

"How did you find me?"

"Wolf led us by—" the guard was cut off by King Valance shoving his way to the front of the group.

"Step aside, damn it. Move!" He elbowed past them and reached the front of the group, where he stopped and stared furiously. "She will talk your ear off if you let her, with an artillery of 'I'm sorry' and 'Please stop.'" He looked at Klaus and Reed. "And who are you two? Actually, never mind. Guard," he reached back and was handed a pistol. "Thank you."

The only thing worse than losing one parent was losing both. And the only thing worse than that was seeingone of them die in front you. Reed would experience that morbid pain today, and it would continue to ache in his heart for the remainder of his life.

King Valance angled the pistol in the direction of Klaus and pulled the trigger, putting a bullet through the man's upper chest. Blood splashed out and painted the side of Reed's face. Klaus fell back in his chair and hit the wall hard, snapping his neck. If the bullet hadn't killed him, surely the backwards tumble had.

"Dad!" shouted Reed.

King Valance lowered the pistol. "Shut the fuck up. You're being charged with royal kidnapping—for which only the death penalty exists."

"_No!_" Princess Valance threw herself over Reed. "I won't let you do this!"

"Peel her off of him."

The imperial guards rushed in and grabbed the princess. They dragged her to the king's side and held her there while Reed watched his father's corpse twitch. Tears started to pour from his eyes, and he leaned over the arm of his chair to vomit.

King Valance decided to let the young man live a little longer while he scolded the princess. He wasn't about to shoot a boy while bile hung from his lips, his guards would end up cleaning it off when they disposed of the corpse. Best to let the boy clean himself.

"This could have all been avoided," he told his daughter. "Honestly, I cannot even begin to fathom your thought process this time. In the past you've been an utter idiot, but at least I was able to understand your motivations. But this?" He looked at the room. "You left the castle for _this?_ Why? Was it _worth_ killing these two men over?"

"Why are you doing this to me?" she asked.

"Don't blame me, dear. You know I love you very much, but you _made_ me do this." He brought the gun back up and pointed it at Reed, who was now on his feet and creeping over to his dad. He needed to see the blood for himself, or else he wouldn't accept that he was dead.

The princess screamed now. She screamed at the top of her lungs. People out in the street had been gathering for a few minutes, attracted first by Wolfe tearing the wall apart, then by the gunshot, and now by the screams. But no one could see past the wall of imperial guards.

"Don't kill him!" she begged. "What will it teach me? _What!_"

The king's finger was pressed hard against the trigger. Any more force would have fired the gun, effectively ending Reed's life right there. But then he realized his daughter was actually making a good point—what _would _this teach her? He'd beaten and humiliated her countless times before because of how poorly she behaved, and clearly none of that worked.

If he wanted to teach her a lesson, he would need to dig deep. None of the past attempts were successful because they were redundant violence, kick after kick, punch after punch. If he _really _wanted to hit her hard, he would need to make a more serious investment. He would need to cultivate a sweet spot so tender that striking it would destroy her.

"You're right." He lowered his weapon. "I love you. This isn't how it should go." He gave the pistol to a guard. "All this time, I've been trying to help you—but none of it has worked. _I've _been the fool."

Reed was sitting on the ground. He didn't seem to know what to do.

"Do you have a name?" the king asked him.

"His name is Reed," the princess said when Reed didn't answer.

"Reed, I'm sorry for what I did. I can't make it up to you." The king got down on a knee. "Would you like to come stay at my castle?"

Reed did not answer.

The king stood up. "Guards, take Reed and the princess to the castle. Give Reed his own room across the hall from her."

"Your Majesty?"

"You heard me. Take his father to the Smeltery."

"Yes sir."

The princess was blown away. Nothing about the situation was characteristic of her father—not the apology, the generosity, nor the sympathy. Had he snapped? Was he really trying to turn over a new leaf? Or did he have something sinister planned? People weren't generally known to go from abusive to caring so quickly.

Time would tell. Time would also reveal what the Smeltery was.


	6. The Church

**CHAPTER SIX: THE CHURCH**

"No, not here."

"Why not?"

"It won't sound good out here. I'll play it for you," said Talia, "but it will be somewhere that does the song justice."

"Like what?"

"I don't know, somewhere with good acoustics."

Lou laughed. "Right, good acoustics."

Quad was history to them. Lou would visit it again in the far future, but Talia would never return to her hometown. She would never see her parents again, or the house she was raised in. They became memories to her, and she did not mind. She was glad to be leaving it behind, with all its sand and theme music performed by cicadas.

Lou had pocketed Provo and Nikki's map while drunk. He wasn't proud of himself for it, but it's not like they would be trekking to Chrome Capital any time soon. It was of much greater use to him. He checked the map and found the capital city was farther away than he expected. It was discouraging, but he didn't have anywhere else to go.

The land was not totally barren here. Grass was sparse, but it grew nonetheless, albeit sun-bleached to the point that it blended in with the sand. Plateaus still dotted the landscape, and Lou saw no end of them in sight. He wondered if they appeared throughout all of Blockland.

"Hey, look," said Talia. She point to the right, off into the savannah. A faded orange and gray building sat out there, with a steeple pointing up from the roof. "It's a church."

"A church?" Lou wondered what deities the people of Blockland worshiped.

"Yeah. We should go check it out."

He nodded. "That's not a bad idea. We could stay there tonight."

They walked off the road and marched into the savannah. Dead grass crunched underfoot, and strange bugs scurried away from them. For the first time ever, Lou realized Blockland had its own complicated ecosystem—the animals living here fit into a food chain somehow, and this world wasn't just a bunch of plastic creatures struggling to stay alive.

The abandoned church's thick doors were already opened up. Lou and Talia stepped inside to find row after row of dusty pews, with light shining down on them from stained glass windows. The windows all had the same subject matter—a single golden block.

Talia pointed at the windows. "You a believer?"

"No."

"Me neither. I never bought into it."

Lou didn't know what religion this church was dedicated too. He wasn't sure if its dogma was truly ridiculous, or if Talia didn't hold faith in it because of the rebellious persona she had built for herself. Either way, he doubted he would ever worship a Blockland religion.

At the head of the church, behind the lectern, was a grand piece of stained glass. It was more masterfully crafted than the rest, with greater attention paid to detail. It portrayed a two-by-four golden brick, which Lou figured must be a religious icon similar to a crucifix.

He would have never guessed the brick was the deity itself.

While Talia walked around the pews, Lou turned back to the door. He saw a ladder led up into the bell tower above.

"Hey," he said. "Look at this."

She walked over and they looked up the ladder. It ended with a hatch in the ceiling.

"Do you think it's unlocked?" she asked.

"Let's find out."

He took hold of the rungs and climbed to the top. The hatch was indeed unlocked, and swung open with a light push. Lou climbed up into the steeple, ducked beneath its big yellow bell, and found it granted a view of the scrubland around them. Talia joined him moments later, and spotted something he did not.

"There's a backpack here," she observed. The brown bag sat slumped in a corner. It was not as dusty as the rest of the building. "You think someone might be staying here?"

Her question was met with an answer. They heard yelling and hooting outside, and stepped over to a window to see what the commotion was. A hefty vehicle sped down the road, kicking up loose bricks behind it. The vehicle held no regard for safety—it swerved and skidded to a stop in front of the church. Its occupants, a group of people dressed in leather and furs, got out but did not leave the wild attitude of the vehicle behind. They punched each other joyfully and roared obscenities. Talia and Lou looked at each other. She went over to the hatch and watched them advance inside.

The group, toting long blades and rifles, walked into the church and threw their weapons down on the pews. One of them didn't belong—he had a bag over his head, and was being walked down the aisle, toward the stage the lectern sat upon.

"I fucking _hate_ taxes!" one of them said. He pulled the bag off of the other's head. "You got a name?"

The man, who Lou could now see wore glasses, was breathing frantically. "Jonathan."

"Johnny!" his escort roared. "What made you become a tax man?"

"Please, let me go! What are you going to do to me?"

"We're gonna get our refunds." The leader of the group nodded to his friends, and they rushed up to the stage. A trapdoor behind the lectern was opened, revealing a pit of zombies in the floor. The undead growled and hissed, throwing dark red spittle into the air.

"No!" said the hostage tax collector. "_Please!_"

"You did this to yourself."

They threw the tax collector into the pit. Talia saw the zombies descend on him like a tsunami, muffling his tortured cries. The trapdoor was thrown shut.

"What happened?" Lou whispered from behind. She waved for him to be quiet.

The group of murderers below laughed at the act they had just committed. The leader pointed at one of his followers.

"Do me a favor, will ya? Go upstairs and grab my bag."

"Sure thing, Nark."

Talia flung herself backwards, away from the hatch. "One of them is coming up!" she told him.

"Shit. What do we do?"

"Go—out a window!"

They rushed over to one of the windows. It was high on the wall, so Lou had to help Talia up to its lip. She climbed, struggling to get out. One of her feet met the bell. It rang.

For a second Lou stood still in fear. Then he heard the leader downstairs yell, "There's someone up there! Hurry!"

He heard someone grab firmly onto the ladder below and start to climb. An excitement hormone entered Lou's bloodstream—he didn't know if blockheads produced adrenaline or some other variety—but it got him moving. He leapt up onto the windowsill and climbed out, crashing onto the roof next to Talia.

"Get over here," she said. He crawled next to her, hiding beneath the lip of the window so that if someone looked out, they would not see them.

Someone emerged in the bell tower. "I don't see anybody, Nark!"

"Check the roof!"

The man walked over to the window and looked around. Lou could hear him place his hands on the ledge, and to his dismay, heave himself up.

Lou remembered the sword Grant gave him. He drew it out as slowly as possible, but it still produced a sheen ringing sound, alerting the murderer above of his presence.

The man jumped down from the ledge seconds after Lou rolled out from underneath and got to his feet. He brandished the sword, but looked very out of place with it. His lack of training showed as clear as day. The man approached him with just his hands, and yet he looked ten times more menacing.

"The hell were you doing in our church?" he asked. Lou did not speak. The man snorted. "No matter. You'll be good zombie feed."

The man lunged forward, but Lou managed a lucky hit between his shoulder and neck. Blood spurted as the man stumbled back in screaming agony.

"Motherfucker!" he exclaimed, and fell off the roof. He hit the ground with a deep thud.

It was the first time in Lou's life he had drawn blood from another person. Even though these people were made of plastic, it still came as a shock to him. He looked down at the sword as the world grew silent around him, and nearly passed out.

"Lou!" Talia shouted. She was on her feet now, and jostled him back into reality. He saw more of the murderous people were gathered in the bell tower.

"Come on," she said, and they went to the edge of the roof. The man Lou had hit with the sword lay on the ground beneath them, grasping his wound in an ill attempt to dam the bleeding. Talia leapt down and landed on him, and Lou followed suite. Everything about it disgusted Lou, but he was filled with an urge to escape no matter the cost. The excitement hormone in his body told him that people were going to die here, and would be better if it was them and not him.

He and Talia started to run down the road, but were stopped when a half dozen leashed zombies were brought out of the church doors and put in their way. They turned around, prepared to go in the opposite direction, but the rest of the murderers had climbed down from the roof and stood behind them.

"Who the _fuck _are you two?" the leader asked. "Do you even know who Iam?"

"No," said Lou.

"I'm Narkis. You ever heard of my gang?"

Talia gasped. "_Narkis._ You're raiders."

"That's right, little lady. You fucked with the wrong people today. You're dead."

Lou didn't know who Narkis was, nor what the raiders were going to do to them, but he didn't want to stick around and find out. He grabbed Talia by the hand and broke away, but the raiders were quick to block him off. They formed a ring around them.

"Drop the sword," Narkis commanded. He produced a pistol. "Fucking drop it!"

Lou obeyed in the hope that it would make the raiders go easy on him. One of them rushed forward and grabbed the sword, examined it, and fell back in line with the rest of the gang.

Narkis spat. "You two caused more trouble than I would have expected, just from looking at you. Somehow you managed to kill one of my boys. That ain't gonna fly."

Lou looked between the raiders before him and saw a shape materializing down the road. It was dark green, with a couple of white spots on the front of it—headlights. It was a Jeep.

"Look at me!" roared Narkis. "The hell is wrong with you? Got a brain problem?"

The Jeep grew closer.

"Tell me your fucking names. I like to know who I'm feeding to my zombies."

The Jeep was close now. Its driver leaned out and grinned. It was Argus. "Well don't just stand there!" he yelled to Lou. "Get outta the way!"

Lou shoved Talia to the side, sending her flying into a raider. They hit the ground, and then he dove out of the way. Argus smashed into Narkis and swerved to the side, drifting over a couple more raiders and killing them.

Argus laughed uproariously. "Eat shit!" He brought his car to a stop and pulled out a shotgun. He blasted two of the nearby raiders. "Get in the car, Lou!"

Lou ran over to Talia and helped her up. The raider she landed on wasn't going to let them get away, though, and grabbed her by the ankle. She and Lou fell to the ground.

"Fuckin' hell." Argus leapt out of his car and ran over to them. He grabbed the raider's hand and snapped his wrist in the other direction, breaking it with a loud crack. The raider scooted away in horror, clutching his broken hand.

Argus practically picked Lou and Talia up by the collars. He hurried them over to the Jeep and set them down next to it. "Get in the car!" he said, and drew his shotgun. He fired a shot at the raider with the broken wrist, then cut through the leashed zombies. After they were in, Argus joined them. "Shit, Lou! You got into some serious trouble here." He pressed the accelerator and sped down the road.

Narkis, with zero feeling in his legs and a broken arm, watched them escape. Blood and saliva hung from his lips. One of his eyes would not open.

"Fuck," he grunted as the car kicked loose dirt into his face. When he opened his one good eye, he saw the Jeep was disappearing in the distance. He lay there surrounded by dead raiders, the members of his once-powerful and widely feared gang.

"How the fuck," he said to himself, in between shallow breaths. "Did this happen."

He knew the name of the man with the sword. His rescuer called him Lou. Narkis vowed to someday find Lou and kill him.

• • •

"Argus!" Lou was amazed to see him. "Where the hell did you come from?"

"Good news, mate. The Zombie Hunter Guild heard about what happened to the Argo, and since everyone fuckin' loves me there, they pitched in to buy me this beauty." He patted the dashboard like a lover. "Meet the Argo II."

Talia, in the backseat, leaned forward. "You two know each other?"

"Yeah. If it wasn't for Argus, I'd be dead," Lou explained. "He found me on the road to Quad and gave me a place to stay for the night. The zombies would have gotten me if he hadn't showed up."

"Just doing my job as a zombie hunter."

"How did you _find_ us?"

"After the guild gave me my new ride, they told me some raiders were harboring zombies out here. I came looking for them and found you two." He extended a hand for Talia to shake. "I'm Argus by the way."

"Talia."

"Who _were _those guys?" Lou asked.

"You've never heard of 'em?" Argus turned onto another road. It was the first intersection Lou had seen so far. "They're the Narkis Crew—_were_ the Narkis Crew, I should say. Led by Narkis himself."

That only raised more questions, but Lou decided to spare Argus's breath. Talia needed more information though. "Where are we going?" she asked.

"Narkis didn't keep zombies as pets. _Well,_ he did, but he was also in a ring of zombie traffickers. That was his collection point, where he kept the zombies until it was time to ship out." Argus turned the radio on. Music blared in the car, forcing him to yell. "Now I'm going to his bust his buyer!"


	7. Solace

**CHAPTER SEVEN: SOLACE**

Princess Valance opened up the door and looked into the hallway. She stepped out of her chamber and walked up to Reed's door, which was directly across from hers. The room had always belonged to a house servant, but after King Valance killed Klaus, he moved the servant down the hall and gave the dwelling to Reed. It didn't make sense to the princess though. She was suspicious of the games her father was playing.

"Reed?" she knocked on the door. He did not answer, so she knocked again and was still met with no response. The boy had to be miserable in there, and as much as she hated to intrude, she opened his door anyway.

He wasn't visible—not at first, anyway. After a couple seconds the princess realized he was slumped beneath the blankets on his bed, unmoving and silent. Knowing how much the death of his father troubled him, it was possible Reed had smothered himself in his sleep last night. The princess wondered what that felt like—not the smothering, but loving one's father so much that their death is heartbreaking.

She pulled the covers off of Reed. He wasn't smothered, but it wouldn't be accurate to say he was alive, either. His eyes were open and he was breathing fine, but he was obviously traumatized by what had happened.

"Reed?" she said. "Are you alright?"

"No."

"I'm sorry. Do you want breakfast? I can bring it to you."

"No."

She stood there for a while. Reed was acting broken, like an animatronic toy who lost a gear and now did all its tricks wrong. Just like the toy, something deep inside him was missing.

The princess broke into tears and collapsed at the side of his bed. "I just want you to know," she told him, "that I am not like my father. I hate him."

And so she wept a little bit until she felt better. When she looked up at Reed later, he seemed to have a new expression. It was one of sympathy, as he realized they were both tortured by the same man, only the princess was unlucky enough to have lived with him for the past twenty years.

"What was that you were saying about breakfast?" he said.

The princess wiped at her tears. "I'll bring you some if you like. There are eggs, toast, and pancakes. Juice too."

"I like pancakes."

She nodded and walked out, careful to close his door silently. She still didn't know how her father viewed Reed—she only knew the king felt some degree of remorse for killing his father, which is why he invited him to stay at the castle. But she had no clue if she would be punished for associating with the boy, despite him living across the hall.

The princess went downstairs to the meeting hall, where she had feasted with the Newarks days earlier. The table was filled with a buffet of breakfast dishes ready for the taking. She grabbed a plate of pancakes and a glass of apple juice, and started off for Reed's room. She found him still in bed when she returned, though he was out from under the covers, so he had made progress at least.

He accepted the food and gobbled it down in no time at all.

"Would you like to see a play with me today?" the princess asked.

"A play?"

"Yes. You liked _Builder on the Roof_, so you should like this one too."

"What's it called?"

"_Bloque Lightning_."

The princess didn't know what the play was about, and really, could not have picked a more inappropriate one to see. _Bloque Lightning _was part comedy, part tragedy. It was about a man who unlocked the power of lightning and could spawn it at his fingertips, and how it turned otherwise mundane situations into hilarious challenges. But it also showed how he struggled with morality, when he wielded so much power could kill anyone in seconds. There were multiple death scenes in the performance sure to disturb Reed so soon after his loss.

They went to see it anyway. Reed accepted the princess's invitation and they snuck downstairs, where they exited through a service door and found themselves outside of the castle. Chrome Capital had its shifty neighborhoods, where the king would never park his carriage at night, but none of them were within miles of the castle. The princess would be safe on her walk to and from the play. They went to the nearest theatre, which was not far. There were plenty of theatres within walking distance of the castle in fact, since it was where the highest class citizens in the entire Empire lived.

Even though Reed had just eaten breakfast, it was nearly afternoon. They caught a matinee showing of _Bloque Lightning _and settled down in one of the front rows, using the princess's royal status as a free pass. She enjoyed the show very much, thought its story was magnificent. She glanced over at Reed a few times and saw him laughing at the jokes too, and he seemed to enjoy himself for a while. But when the tragic parts of the story occurred, and innocent characters died, she noticed a strong shift in his demeanor. He went blank-faced and showed very little emotion, only letting subdued frowns slip out.

Night was creeping over the capital when the play ended. The air became frigid, and hundreds of miles away on the outskirts of the Empire, zombies emerged from their dark caves and scoured the land. But the princess knew next to nothing about that—she was aware zombies were a problem, but had never seen one in person. She had never seen what was left of the victims either.

"Would you like dinner?" she asked Reed.

"Sure."

So she took him to a restaurant she hadn't visited since she was young. The last time she had been there was way back when her mother was still alive, and King Valance didn't lose his temper so easily. They served the greatest meals, all of which cost a small fortune to anyone but the super wealthy, although the princess again used her status to get their food for free.

When the meal came she dove right in. Being away from her father was good enough, but the warmth of the meal in her stomach topped it off. It was like icing on the cake. She was nearly finished with her food when she noticed Reed hadn't touched his. He sat there, just looking down at the salad while tears dripped into the greens.

"What's wrong?" She knew it was a dumb question, but wanted to pinpoint the exact thing bothering Reed.

"My dad," he sniffled, "made terrible salads."

Reed began to sob there in the restaurant. The princess got him up and they left, returning to the castle minutes later. She knew something that might make him feel better, although she had hoped to save it as a last resort. It was something her father didn't know about, a secret kept between her and the gardener, who didn't really approve either but allowed it nonetheless.

The courtyards throughout the castle were populated by beautiful plants. Some of them had flowers, some had fruit, and some had bushes. One of the yards near the princess's room had one flower in specific, the fyrole, that possessed hallucinogenic properties. If its petals were consumed, it acted as a drug in the host's system and elated their mood. When crying and eating food failed to comfort the princess during her darkest hours, she would sneak down to the courtyard with the fyroles and eat a few petals. They never failed her.

She guided Reed into the courtyard by hand. He gave her a strange look when she got down on her knees and pulled a flower apart, handed him some pieces of it, and began to eat her share.

"What are you doing?"

"Trust me," she said. "These will help."

She ate a couple more petals and fell back into the grass. Reed swallowed his bits and followed her example, lying down. The courtyard had no roof, and light pollution was low in Chrome Capital. They were able to see the stars perfectly.

Fyroles were not just hallucinogens. They had anti-depressant abilities, and anyone tripping on them would usually come down in a much better mood. Princess Valance, for example, would trust her father a lot more after that night. After all, she hadn't seen him the entire day. Maybe he was trying to give her some more space? Maybe he really was trying to become a better person?

Reed would be affected similarly. He came to the conclusion that Princess Valance wasn't lying earlier, when she told him she was different from the king. He also realized that death was an inevitable stage in everyone's life, and so was loss. His father had to die eventually, and just like every other person on the planet, Reed was grieving from that.

Both of them had poor thought processes, of course. Their decision making was skewed by the effects of the fyroles—the princess had every right to hate her father, and Reed would not have accepted the reality of the situation so quickly unless he was tripping.

These drugs would damage them in the long run. But for now, they were fine. The two of them fell asleep in the courtyard.

• • •

During the night, servants found Princess Valance and Reed strung out in the grass. They were horrified at first, clueless as to what they were tripping on, and ran to get the king. King Valance took one look at them and decided no medical treatment would be required. He didn't know that the fyroles acted as drugs, didn't even know the flowers _existed,_ but he knew the young adults would be okay. He had the servants carry them to their rooms and put them to bed.

Princess Valance woke up after Reed, but she was the first one to step out of her room. She went across the hall and found him fully dressed, looking out the window.

"Good morning," she told him.

"Morning."

"Care for some breakfast?"

"Not hungry." He stepped away from the window. "But do you know if there's anywhere in this castle where I can—" he did not finish his thought.

"Where you can what?"

"Well, I was a printer, you know. Before . . ."

"Right. Before what happened, happened."

"Yeah. Is there anywhere I can print?"

She nodded. "Yes there is. Why though?"

He shrugged.

"Well okay then," she said. "Follow me, I'll take you."

They walked up to the next floor, and the princess led Reed through a maze of corridors to one room in particular. He didn't understand how she could tell each room apart, none of them were marked, but somehow she knew that one room had printing supplies. When she opened up the door he found it was filled with more than just equipment for printing, but it had general art supplies too—canvases, paints, and mosaic tiles, just to name a few.

"What are you going to make?" she asked him.

"Some art."

"May I watch?"

"I want it to be a surprise."

Reed walked over to a low table, a printing station, and grabbed a print gun off the wall. He put a flat brick on the table, and in seconds was plastering letters and numbers on the plate in some sort of arrangement, an arrangement only he knew.

The princess, not wanting to be left out, went over to a different table and examined its contents. Mosaic tiles were scattered about, inviting her to put them in order—any order. So she joined in, and the two of them spent the day making art. They were a lot like Talia and Lou in that respect, despite the distance of thousands of miles between them. Both pairs found comfort in art, they loved how free it made them feel.

Hours later, the princess decided she was done arranging her tiles and grouting them together. She lifted up her work, an abstract piece dripping with shades of blue and purple, and got Reed's attention.

"Take a look," she said.

He turned around. "Wow. I like it."

"You do?"

"Yeah. It seems melancholy, but lovely at the same time." He was exactly right. That's how the princess felt when she was making the mosaic, but wasn't able to put it into words until then. Reed was able to though, and he did it in a way that made her feel secure about her art. She had confidence in it.

"Are you finished with yours?"

"Just about." He turned back to the plate and fired the print gun into it a few dozen more times. The _woop _sound it made had surely engrained itself in her brain at that point. She'd listened to it hour after hour, and already it droned in her ears. She could only imagine how bad it must be for Reed, considering he was surrounded by the _woops_ for his whole life as a professional printer.

"Done," he stated, and pulled it off the table. The plate was as big as him, but he didn't have trouble standing it upright.

"Reed," she said. "It's gorgeous."

He had spent the past few hours coating the plate in thousands of characters, to the point that they all meshed together and formed the illusion of a flower field. Asterisks represented flowers, while 'I's were their stems. The background of the plate was an almost solid green field of letters laid overtop each other.

"My favorite scene from _Builder_," he said.

• • •

That night they collected more fyroles at Reed's request. They took the flowers up to the roof of the castle and ate them, then stargazed the rest of the night. During his trip, Reed imagined himself meeting King Valance and slowly forgiving him for killing his father. They weren't on amiable terms quite yet, but after the fyroles wore off, Reed felt less anguish over what the king had done.

The princess imagined herself lying in a field of flowers, much like the one Reed had printed. In her trip she imagined a fine young man next to her, though she never saw his face, just basked in his presence. She imagined he was the kind of person who nursed her self-esteem back to normal after all the years her father treated her poorly.

Beneath their wonderful drug-fueled dreams, Reed and Princess Valance were growing addicted to the fyroles.

• • •

The little fucks were on the roof. King Valance could hear them up there banging around, doing Golden Brick-knows-what. He had to fight his anger to keep from going up and throttling his daughter's neck and killing that orphaned boy she seemed to like so much.

But he reminded himself he was a better father now. He didn't hurt his daughter anymore, and he wouldn't kill an innocent person like Klaus again. He was in total control of his temper. He would be a good father to the princess.


	8. Portals

**CHAPTER EIGHT: PORTALS**

Lou looked like he was ready to vomit. The memory of all that blood gushing from the raider messed with his head. He _killed _a man. Just pulled his sword out and sliced into him, no mercy.

Talia noticed how contorted with disgust Lou's face was. "You alright?" she asked.

He shook his head.

"What's bothering you?"

"I killed that guy yesterday."

"Is that why you've been so quiet?" Argus asked from the driver's seat. "That ain't something to feel bad about."

"I've never killed anyone before though."

"You should get used to it, mate. It was either you or him."

The Jeep bounced as the next town became visible around a bend. It had a river running through it—the first body of water Lou had seen so far in Blockland—with a water millwheel dipping into it. Unlike Quad, which was something of a hamlet, the town they approached seemed to have a population in the hundreds.

"What is his place?" Lou asked.

"Undeshire."

Along with the river, the town had another thing Lou had yet to see—paved roads. Up to this point, the only roads he had travelled on were made of dirt and sand. Undeshire broke that precedent—its streets were made of asphalt, bordered by thriving shops and restaurants, and leading away into neighborhoods.

"I'm not particularly a fan," said Argus. "Places like this almost never get zombies. Quad is like a buffer—they catch all the undead before they reach here. I'm out of my element this far into the Empire."

"How far into the Empire _are _we?" Talia asked. "Anywhere near the capital?"

"Of course not, the capital is still over a thousand miles away." He laughed. "You've got a long way to go before you start to see anything regal."

Argus drove into town and stopped along a curb, outside of an inn. The building was three stories tall and built from dark brown wood, with rows of clean windows lining its sides. It looked like an enormous log cabin, with a modern roof that started at one end of the building and reached up into the air at the other.

"I'll see if they got any rooms for us," said Argus.

Talia reached into her pocket and produced a little cash. She offered it to Argus, who accepted. Lou would have liked to chip in, but he had no Blockland currency on him—he didn't even know what kind of currency was used here.

"I, uh," he stammered.

"It's alright. I'll cover you." Argus walked into the inn and approached the front desk. Lou watched him through the glass doors.

"You don't have any money?" Talia asked.

"No."

"Why not?"

He didn't have an answer. "I don't know."

Argus saved the conversation from going any further by marching out of the inn, triumphant. "We got a room," he said, and pulled the car into a parking spot. The three of them walked up to the unit they would stay in that night, and found it was furnished with a theme. Much like how the exterior of the building looked like a giant log cabin, the room was decked out with furniture of varying chocolate and taupe colors.

Talia wasted no time plopping herself down on the sofa and turning the television on. Lou took a seat next to her as she flicked through channels, coming to rest on a family network.

"I'm gonna head out," said Argus. "Scope out the area, see if I can find Narkis's buyers."

"See you later," Lou waved. Argus walked out of the room and started down the stairs. Lou turned to Talia. "So is this a good place to play _After School Special_?"

She thought about it for a moment. "Nope."

"Why not?"

"I'm telling you, _After School Special _is the single greatest song ever made. When you hear it for the first time, it can't be in some dinky hotel room. It's gotta be somewhere special."

Lou accepted that and leaned back into the couch. A commercial came on the television, with blaring trumpets and the sound of hammers beating on bricks. It was an ad for the Builder Union, which he had never heard of.

"What's that?" he asked.

"The Builder Union? It's a labor union . . . for builders." She paused. "Don't tell me you don't know what a builder is."

"I don't."

"Jeez Lou, where do you _come _from? Builders are responsible for all the houses and shops in Blockland. They build everything out of bricks."

"So, could we become builders?"

She laughed at the idea. It was ridiculous.

• • •

Argus walked into the bar with a charming smile and his hair fixed as neatly as he could make it. He wasn't here to drink though—granted, he would have some alcohol—but that was not the top priority. He was here in search of intrigue about the zombie trafficking ring Narkis had been supplying. Bars were where people became their most loose-lipped, and faced with a handsome brute like Argus, the women would surely talk.

He chose a woman by the bar and walked up to her.

"Bartender, two beers for me and this fine lady," he said. Any woman in their right mind would have slapped Argus across the face and fled from the strange man, who reeked of burly cologne meant to mask sweat, but not this woman. She was under the influence of alcohol, and her judgment was so impaired that he seemed like an honest guy here to buy her another drink. His musk was mesmerizing, when it should have been revolting.

"Hi," she said. "I'm Anne."

"Anne. Nice to meet you." Argus accepted the two drinks from the bartender and gave one to her. "I'm new in Undeshire," he said after taking a sip. "Not very familiar with the place. Anything I should see while I'm here?"

"My bed." She laughed, flinging spittle from her lips. She was drunker than Argus thought. "I'm kidding. One thing you need to know about me is I'm hilarious."

"You sure are. But really, is there anywhere I should stop before I leave?"

"No sweetie, this town is boring as hell. There's work though."

"Really? And where would that be?"

"Warehouse district," she said, and turned away briefly to down some of the beer he bought her. "Now gimme a kiss," she ordered as she turned back to him. But Argus was gone, out the bar and down the street. The people doing illegal things, the ones who were up to no good, always brought work with them. If there was work by the warehouses, that's where he found find the zombie ring.

He walked on a sidewalk bordering the river. The warehouse district was in clear view on the edge of the waterway, with concrete docks and massive storage buildings lining it. It didn't take long to find the warehouse the zombie traffickers were using—it was guarded on the outside by men with pistols.

Argus found a ladder on one of the adjacent warehouses and climbed up to its roof. From there he leapt onto the building the zombies were held within, and looked down through a skylight. The security inside was much tighter, with the guards now armed with rifles and shotguns. They stood around a group of large shipping containers, which Argus figured must be what they stored the zombies inside of.

His suspicions were confirmed when one of the guards walked over to a container, opened up the small window in its side, and chucked a piece of meat in to feed the zombies.

Argus grinned, knowing this would be a piece of cake.

• • •

"My parents raised me to play the violin," said Talia. "It was too classical for me. I started playing the synthesizer instead, but they told me to stop. They thought it was a waste of time."

"That's crappy."

"Yeah. I guess it was a waste of time after all, since they got rid of it. All that practice down the drain."

"You're out on your own now though. Couldn't you buy another?"

"Synths aren't cheap. What about you? Did you have shitty parents?"

Lou shook his head. "My parents were good."

"Where did they raise you? Must have been far away in some dark basement dungeon for you to not know what a builder is."

"I'm from Manhattan."

"Never heard of it."

"I wouldn't expect you to, it's not even in Blockland. It's somewhere else entirely."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

The door was thrown open and Argus walked in. "Found the traffickers," he announced. "There's not that many of them—eight or so. They won't be hard to take down if we're stealthy. Are you two gonna give me a hand?"

"What, kill them?" Talia said.

"Well we ain't gonna have a tea party with them, little lady."

"I'll pass."

"Me too," said Lou.

"Looks like I'm gonna have to do this one on my own then, right?" Argus moped. "Yeah, it's gonna be me all alone out there, just me versus eight other guys." He shook his head in disappointment. "I even paid for the room."

"Argus, we don't want to help you kill anyone," Lou stated.

"Oh no, I get it. You don't need to tell me a second time." He started for the door, but before closing it, turned back to give them one final message. "But Lou, you'd better get used to killing. You won't last very long out here if you don't." Then he left.

"What was that about?" Talia asked. "Did he just try to guilt us into going with him?"

"He did it to me the first time we met. I ended up going with him on a zombie killing spree. It was horrifying."

Lou thought back to that night. He remembered how happy Argus seemed when he blew through the mound of zombies in his Jeep, then finished off the leftovers with a shotgun. He wondered if the man would find as much delight in clearing the warehouse.

That's when Lou realized just how dangerous Blockland was. Hordes of zombies harassed the land while the populace relied on sociopaths like Argus to protect them. And the opposition was even worse—bloodthirsty raiders like Narkis fed tax collectors to the undead, and loved every minute of it.

Maybe there was truth in what Argus said. Maybe Lou needed to learn to kill.

• • •

Argus would need alcohol. He always needed it when he had to kill other people. Zombies weren't a problem, they were mindless beasts, shells of the thinking people they once were. Killing them was _fun. _But people—people who had memories, friends, and hobbies—that wasn't easy for Argus. As much as he loved the thrill of his job, that one part was always hard for him.

He walked into the bar—a different one than before, he didn't want to run into the woman he left behind earlier that day—and spotted a familiar face. Sitting at a stool was Nikki, an old friend he remembered from his early days as a zombie hunter. The last time he saw her was a few months ago at a guild meeting, since she was still in a position of power at the Zombie Hunter Guild, but apart from that they didn't see each other frequently enough. He was pleasantly surprised to see her.

"Nikki!" he said, patting her on the back and taking a seat. He waved to the bartender for a drink.

"Argus?" she smiled. "You're a sight for sore eyes. How are you doing?"

"Mighty fine. You?"

"I'm alright."

"How's Provo? Where's he at?"

She took a long drink, preparing to deliver the next line. "Provo's dead."

"Bad joke. He's in the bathroom isn't he?"

Nikki knew this was going to be a painful conversation. She downed the rest of her drink and motioned to the bartender for another one. "I'm not kidding. He's dead."

"He's . . . dead?" It dawned on Argus that Nikki might not be kidding around.

"Yeah."

The bartender put a couple drinks in front of them. Argus chugged his while Nikki worked at hers steadily.

"What happened to him?"

"We were caught off-guard by the tax collector. We didn't have enough money. I guess the example they set with Grant needed to be renewed, so they did Provo in."

"Bastards."

They drank for a while. Nikki looked miserable while Argus became filled with rage. Provo was a good man, twice the zombie hunter Argus was. That's why he and Nikki had to retire so early—Argus had been at the hunt longer than them, but they did their jobs so well that they had no more motivation after a few years. They _deserved _to settle down and not be bothered, but now Argus saw they weren't given that.

"Why did you come to Undeshire?" he asked.

"They took our house, too."

"Fuck that."

She took a sip. "I know why you're here. That zombie ring. You're here to bust it." As a guild leader, she knew as much about the trafficking as Argus.

"That's right." He looked over at her. "You should come with me, for old times' sake."

"I don't know. I'm a bit sick of killing right now. Those people are doing something terrible, but they have families. Some of them might be husbands."

"Who am I talking to right now? Wasn't it you who told me the only good zombie profiteer is a dead one?"

"How long ago did I say that, a decade?"

"Yeah, but it's still true. You remember how fun it used to be. We'd go in, guns blazing, and clear the place. Then we'd get a nice party at the guild and a bonus would arrive in the mail."

"That _was_ a perk."

"Do you remember what we would always say? Our catchphrase?"

"Of course. No one at the guild says it anymore, it's such a shame." Nikki was visibly in a better mood. A smile crossed her face, and for the first time since Argus walked in, she didn't give her drink her full attention. "Eat shit. Wasn't that it?"

"Yep. Eat shit."

She took one more sip, then she was finished. "Alright, you've convinced me. This might be the beer talking, but let's go."

Lou and Talia were walking into the bar as Argus and Nikki were walking out. Argus, with an urge to kill in him, shook Lou in excitement.

"You heard the news?" he asked.

"The news?"

"Shit's back on the menu." Argus roared in laughter and passed them by. Then it was Nikki's turn.

"Hey there Lou." She grinned and made a grunting sound.

"Are you alright?"

"I'm great. Just making a fresh batch of _shit._" She, too, laughed with a murderous fury. Then she was gone, and the bar grew silent.

"How do you know these weird-ass zombie hunters?" Talia asked him.

Lou shrugged. They sat down at a booth and ate some bar food—greasy fries and pizza—while Argus and Nikki's firefight took shape in the distance. At first they heard a couple gunshots, but from there it progressed to a full-blown shootout. A couple of people outside ran into their homes and hid, but no one in the bar cared. Out here, where grass was sparse, frontier justice must have been the norm.

A while later the zombie hunters returned. Their weapons were put away, it was the proper thing to do, but it was obvious they were the sources of carnage. They had done their best to clean themselves up, but they had spots of blood on their shoes and their skin was flustered.

"How did it go?" Lou asked as they came and sat down at the booth.

"It was a breeze," Argus stated. He grabbed a handful of fries and discarded pizza cheese, then devoured it all. "You guys wanna head back to the inn?"

"Sure."

"Alright. Nikki's gonna be staying with us by the way."

• • •

They returned to the hotel room and found the television had been left on. Lou sat down on the couch to continue watching it, and saw the commercial for the Builder Union was playing once again. Though this time he noticed something that had slipped past him in his first viewing. In the bottom right corner of the ad were three overlapping tools—the hammer of the builders, but also a wrench and a print gun.

"Talia," he said, and pointed to the onscreen tools, "what are those?"

She stepped over and caught a glimpse before the commercial ended. "The wrench is for the Eventer Union, and the print gun is for printers," she explained.

"How do you know this stuff?"

"It's pretty common knowledge. But my dad was an eventer when he was young."

Lou had another question for her. "What's an eventer?"

"Do you really not know? They event bricks to do stuff," she told him, but his face just became confused. "Oh, come on," she said. "They can turn bricks into trampolines. Or lights."

"Can they make portals?"

"Portals?"

"Like, portals to other worlds."

She said nothing. Argus and Nikki, who had been at the other side of the room fixing drinks, also took a moment to let his question float in the air. Talia broke the silence at last. "Uh, I don't know. That's a weird question."

After that, everyone went off to sleep. Argus and Nikki shared one of the bedrooms, with Nikki in the bed and Argus on the floor. He had insisted she take the more comfortable spot, since she was grieving over the loss of her husband and needed as much rest as possible. Talia took the other bedroom, and Lou slept on the couch in the front.

Lou was the first one awake the next morning. He had enough time to eat a light breakfast, go to the nearest library, check out a few books, and return to the inn before anyone else got up. He brought with him some informative material about the history of building and eventing, so that he could learn more about these crafts that seemed so essential to Blockland.

He read that building was a combination of architecture and landscaping. Builders were responsible for flattening land and erecting whatever structures the populace paid for—residences, storefronts, forts, parks, and factories, for instance. Every building in the world was made by them. They acquired their job titles by attending specialty schooling and earning a builder's license.

A license wasn't the only thing builders needed to do their job though. A hammer was required to break misplaced bricks, which were put down using a 'brick tool'—something unique to Blockland, it seemed. The brick tool was a handheld item that could spawn stored bricks and place them in the world.

Eventing was much more interesting to Lou though. There was nothing like it back in Manhattan, because like the brick tool, it was only found in Blockland. Eventers also had to attend a specialty school to get their eventer's license and tool of the trade—the wrench. By wrenching bricks, eventers could create wondrous chains of events that performed various functions. An evented brick could kill anyone who set foot on it, or launch people into the air, or spawn a stream of bullets, or burn people, among hundreds of other tasks.

In one of the books about eventing, Lou learned that new events were still being discovered in modern times. To him, the power of eventing was nothing short of magic. Printing, however, was much more mundane. Printers used their print guns to affix decals on the faces of bricks—an unremarkable practice even in Manhattan.

Argus emerged from his room as Lou wrapped up his reading. He noticed the stack of books on the table in front of the sofa and asked Lou about them.

"Pay a visit to the library this morning?"

"Yeah. I've been reading about eventing and building."

Argus stepped into the kitchen, only separated from the living room by a countertop. "What got you interested in them?"

"You can do so much with events. And did you know they're still finding new ones every day?"

"No. I don't pay attention to the blue-collar industries. They're all a bunch of snobs."

"Well, these snobs could be my way home. Any idea how I can get in contact with some of them?"

Argus laughed. "Whatever it is you want them to make, they'll charge you an arm and a leg for it. That's assuming you have the money to buy the land, and a permit for doing event work." He stirred a cup of coffee and sipped it.

"Well . . . are there any alternatives? I could pay them under the table."

"Sure. The Empire has hundreds of slaves who know how to build and event. We could always liberate one of their labor camps." Argus scoffed. "Seriously though, I don't mean to hurt your feelings mate, but an under the table payment would cost even more."

The bedroom doors opened up, and Nikki and Talia stepped out.

"What's all the noise?" Talia asked.

"Argus, your voice goes through walls, you know," Nikki added.

Lou stood up from behind his mountain of books. "We're going to liberate a slave camp."

"No, no," Argus said. "Lou's kidding. We aren't going anywhere near a slave camp."

"Why not? The slaves there have the tools and experience we need. You said so yourself."

"Shit, it was a joke. Every camp has armed guards, and we don't even know where they _are. _The Empire has never disclosed their locations. They could be rumors for all we know."

"Uh," said Nikki. "It would probably be a major crime too."

"Well that's a non-issue. We've committed plenty of crimes."

"If we don't save some slaves, then how are we supposed to get any tools?" Lou asked. "It's not like I can afford to commission some myself."

"Hold on." Talia put her hands out for him to stop talking. "Am I missing something? What do we need these tools for in the first place?"

"So I can get home."

"Where _is _your home? You act like you don't know anything about Blockland. You didn't know what eventing and building were until I explained them to you." She paused. "Lou, where are you from, exactly?"

He knew they would have a hard time believing him. He was afraid of telling them that he wasn't from Blockland, that he was from a whole other place—a place that was bound by different laws of physics, chemistry, biology, and seemed to be fundamentally different in composition. Everything in Blockland was built from connectable plastic bricks, but back on Earth things didn't fit together so well. People were made of flesh, which was made of cells, which were made of atoms. Lou didn't want to explain atoms to them—he barely understood them himself.

But he told them anyway. "I'm not from Blockland," he admitted. "I'm from Earth."

"What?"

"I get that it sounds crazy, but believe me. I was born in New York and moved to Manhattan. Then one day I was in Blockland, and I don't know how I got here, but this isn't where I belong."

"So what you're saying is," said Argus, "you're an alien."

"I don't know if that's the right word. I guess so?"

Argus and Nikki looked at each other. "Yeah . . ." Argus looked at him like he was insane. "Lou, that's some weird shit. If you're kidding, you should tell us now."

"I'm not kidding."

"Then I'll see myself out of here. That's some crazy talk if I've ever heard it."

"Me too," said Nikki. "Wait for me, Arg."

The two zombie hunters walked out of the room. Lou wouldn't see either of them for a while after that.

"Do you believe me?" he asked Talia.

"Not really. You _have_ to be crazy for thosetwo to walk out on you."

"Well, I'm not making this stuff up. I promise."

She shook her head. "It's a wild claim."

"I guess it is, but it's true." He felt uncomfortable, embarrassed almost. So he changed the subject. "Are we still going to the capital together?"

"I'll keep going with you on one condition. Don't talk about this weird stuff anymore. I _will _leave if you freak me out."

He nodded in resignation. "Alright. I'd probably die out there without you, anyway."

They left the inn later and pressed toward the capital. Lou knew Talia was more suspecting of him now, and probably wouldn't feel safe around him for a while. Argus was clinically insane and not even _he_ wanted to be near Lou.

It would be a long time until they reached the capital, but when they did, questions would be answered. Lou felt like a stranger here, but in a few weeks' time, he would be less alone. He would make important friends in Chrome Capital, and they would bring him closer to getting home.

But until then, the world was a harsh and terrifying place.


	9. Addiction

**CHAPTER NINE: ADDICTION**

The princess didn't know where Reed was. He wasn't in his bedroom, and he wasn't in the art room. She doubted he had gone downstairs—he didn't like to interact with the royal staff. He was very reclusive.

She went out to one of the courtyards, and sure enough he was lying on the ground next to blossoming fyroles, strung out on their hallucinogenic petals. She walked over to him and got down on her knees.

"Reed?" she said, and nudged him. He responded with a bothered moan.

"Melinda."

"How long have you been here?"

He laughed at a joke in his head, then gave her what passed as an answer. "A while."

She frowned. "Can you please snap out of it?"

Smiling, he rolled over. He was miles away mentally.

With a sigh, the princess reached down and grabbed his hands, then started a long haul back to the art room She dragged him through the gray corridors of the castle, up uneven stairs and over jagged bricks. If Reed had been lucid, the dragging would have had him writhing in pain. But with him under the influence of drugs, he wouldn't feel the bruises until later.

It was humiliating. Royal servants stopped multiple times to ask the princess what she was doing, if she needed help, and if the king knew what she was up to. She felt like it was a sort of punishment—_she _was the reason Reed was staying at the castle in the first place. And now she was responsible for him, and that meant dragging his limp body through the building as he came down from his high at a snail's pace.

They reached the art room after half an hour of sweat and flustered embarrassment. Reed was still out of his mind, although he had formed some loosely coherent sentences during the last leg of the journey. "I ate it," was the first phrase the princess heard him utter, followed later by "Can I be the dog?" The climax, though, was when he asked "Where are you taking me?" only to follow it up with a burst of laughter and more rambling. He must have eaten a sizeable amount of fyroles to be that loopy.

In the art room, the princess dragged Reed twenty final steps over to the print station. She laid him down on the ground next to it, and then was done. She stepped over to the countertop covered in mosaic tiles and unmixed grout, then began to make art. An hour into her work, she heard Reed shuffle to his feet and the _wooping _of his print gun began. She did not bother to turn around and look at him though. She continued her mosaic.

The two of them worked without speaking for the rest of the day. Princess Valance's mosaic was a print gun on a circular frame—a gift for Reed. She didn't give it to him when it was finished though. She still refused to turn around. Instead, the princess made noise with her hands until Reed was finished with his print. Moving tiles around, shaking the grout bag, banging on the countertop—she did all this to make herself sound occupied.

Later, a long time after his trip ended, Reed finally spoke. "You're angry with me, aren't you?"

"I am."

"Is it because I used the fyroles?"

"No. It's because you used so much of them, and I had to drag you up here."

"They won't _kill _me though."

"You don't know that. I don't know that either. The problem is one of the servants could find you, and my father might get angry that you're high in a courtyard." She spun around and looked at him. "And you know what happens when he gets angry."

"You're right." He reached over and grabbed the plate he had been printing on. It was small, the size of a wall painting. "I made you something," he said and offered the plate to her.

It was a portrait. A portrait of her. Princess Valance looked down at the plate and felt like she was looking into a spotty mirror. Her skin was made of countless tanned letters, while her eyes were comprised of colored ones dotted by glimmering white asterisks.

"Damn," she whispered. "You're good at this."

"Years of practice."

She set the plate down to retrieve her mosaic and handed it to him. "I made you something too."

"It's a print gun," he said. "I like it."

"I like yours too."

"Are you still mad at me?"

"No. But don't do the fyroles again unless I'm with you."

They were being watched. Wolfe, the king's talented hunter, sat in a tower at the other end of the castle. With a pair of binoculars, he could see Princess Valance and Reed making a mess of the art room—scattering tiles across the countertop and accidentally printing the table.

He put the binoculars down and produced a handheld radio. "Your Majesty," he said as it clicked.

King Valance, somewhere else in the castle, had a matching radio. He pulled his out and replied. "Go ahead Wolfe."

"They're making art again."

The king sighed. "That's all they ever do, besides eating those damn flowers. What does the art looks like?"

"The boy made a portrait of the princess. She made a very bad mosaic of a print gun."

"Gifts for each other?"

"Yes."

"How is she acting?"

Wolfe picked the binoculars back up and watched. In the distance, he could see Princess Valance looking at the portrait with a blinding smile. She hugged Reed.

"She's smiling, and touching him."

"Good."

"Do you . . . want me to stop it?" He frowned in revulsion. "I wouldn't be surprised if they kissed."

"Why would I do that? Let them be, Wolfe."

"Yes sir."

King Valance put his radio away. If his daughter fancied Reed, then so be it. The king was operating with a hands-off approach to the princess, at least for now.

• • •

Wolfe continued to watch them well into the evening, when the princess took the boy out into the flower fields behind the castle. The two of them lay down in the grass, surrounded by floral scents drifting in the breeze, and watched the sky change colors as the sun dove away. It started out blue, but as the evening progressed, it became orange spillage.

"Melinda, mind if I ask you a personal question?" said Reed.

"I don't guarantee an answer."

He breathed deep. "Did you know your mom?"

"For a little while, when I was younger."

"What was she like?"

The princess could have told him that she remembered vague feelings of tenderness and love to spare, but she decided that would not do the deceased queen justice. So she told him a story.

"One time I remember playing outside—in this very field—and scuffing my dress. I went inside, dreading whatever punishment my parents had in store for me, and found my mother. She took one look at the scuff and smiled, and then she took me up to her room and cleaned it right off. My knee was also cut, but I didn't tell her that. She still knew to lift the dress and kiss my knee though."

"She sounds like she was a great woman."

"She was," said the princess. "Do you remember your mother?"

"Yeah, she didn't pass away very long ago. She was a baker, and made my family most of our money. I still remember her bread. It was good, warm bread. Not like what my dad makes." He stopped to correct himself. "Made."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be."

"I hate my father for what he did."

"I don't."

She sat up and looked over. "What do you mean?"

"The fyroles have made me feel better about the whole thing. I don't even think about it anymore."

"How can you just _not _think about it?"

"Jeez Melinda. You don't have to snap at me. The fyroles helped, okay?"

"I don't understand how you can forget about it so easily."

"I never said it was easy. The fyroles haven't helped you at all?"

"They've helped with some stuff, but not this."

Reed shrugged. "Well, just try to keep your mind off it. Look at the clouds and the flowers. Ignore your dad."

She took his advice and watched the clouds. They floated by without a care in the world. In that moment, when all outside problems fell away from her mind, she was left with one thought. She liked Reed a lot.

• • •

With zero emotion on his face, King Valance watched them lay in the flower fields from a window. He didn't know what they were discussing, and having dismissed Wolfe for the day half an hour ago, he never would. If he had to guess, he figured they must be talking about art. That's all they cared about anymore—art.

The only piece of art the king treasured was a high quality print he commissioned years ago. It was a portrait of his late wife Melinda which, unlike Reed's scrambling of letters resembling a face, looked exactly like her.

The king approached the picture and picked it up. He held it close to him and reminisced about how happy he was when she was around. Since he lost her, every waking moment of the king's life could be defined as utter loneliness. He felt empty.

After setting the picture down, he stepped back to the window. His daughter was still out in the field with the boy. The king wondered what life would have been like if his wife and son hadn't died in childbirth. He knew the world wouldn't be as bleak as it was, and that the princess wouldn't be so disobedient. He also knew he wouldn't be fostering Reed, in fact, he would never have laid eyes on the boy.

The king's previously blank expression molded into one of sorrow, for he knew the world had more pain in store—but not just for him.


	10. The Death of Lou

**CHAPTER TEN: THE DEATH OF LOU**

Narkis was in bad shape, to put it lightly. The past three days had been a constant struggle to survive. With his wounds, any normal person would have died during the first night when the zombies came out. But not Narkis—he knew how to keep himself alive.

Shortly after Lou and his rescuer drove off in the Jeep, Narkis crafted a plan to stay alive. Survivalism was all about being prepared, and Narkis started by dragging all of his fallen allies into the church. He did all this while crawling—his legs were useless. The Jeep had crushed them.

Leaving corpses out in the open was a bad idea. Zombies were attracted to the odor of death, and if they found Narkis's crew, it would be like a buffet. The undead would feast on the corpses until they reanimated, and then Narkis would have even more zombies to deal with.

After he finished dragging them all inside, he shut the church doors and barricaded them. The trapdoor behind the lectern was open. Beneath it were a half dozen captive zombies, easily capable of overpowering the crippled Narkis if they got ahold of him. He didn't take any risks—the trapdoor was closed and bolted immediately.

When night came, Narkis heard the undead emerge and roam the land around the church. They were not very numerous—it was difficult for zombies to get this far past Quad—but they were dangerous nonetheless. He didn't sleep much, knowing he would snore and attract them to the building, so he spent the night lying beneath a pew trying to stay silent. Morning came after what felt like an eternity, and the zombies dissipated into the nearby cave systems.

Narkis emerged from beneath the pew and climbed up to the bell tower using his one good arm and his teeth. He found a stash of supplies there, and drank some water and ate what small morsels of food were available. It occurred to him that he didn't have much sustenance to live on, and if he didn't find a way out of here, would die of malnutrition.

The second day consisted of looking for food. The cacti near the church were good sources of moisture, but were almost impossible to harvest with neither of Narkis's legs working and one arm broken. He was reduced to drinking water from dirty puddles, and when his stomach began to growl, was forced to eat the last of the food stocked up in the church—which wasn't much. Narkis didn't know what he would eat the next time he got hungry.

That night was a rough one. Narkis had gone two days without sleep, and in between yawns, found himself struggling to keep his eyes open. He managed to get some sleep amid the growls from the undead outside, and never snored terribly loud because of how shallow his slumber was.

The lack of rest coupled with the exertion of the past few days left Narkis exhausted. He was malnourished—dehydrated and in need of food. Spending any more time out in the sun would cook him to death. So he did what he felt was the only option—he consumed his dead crew. There were a couple of wooden slats leaned against the wall, which he placed out on the front steps of the church and lit ablaze. Using the fire, he cooked his fallen allies until they were brown and tender. They kept him going for the rest of the third day, until help finally arrived at sundown.

Narkis had a decent following throughout Blockland, although this region was where most of his people resided. After the news of Argus killing the zombie traffickers became mainstream, and Narkis had not been heard from in days, some of his more distant followers decided to come out to the church and see what had happened to their leader. They came in a Jeep held together by welded scrap metal and rusty bolts.

The Jeep appeared shortly before the sun skimmed the horizon. It barreled down the empty road and came to stop near the church, where Narkis lay near the fire with bloodstained hands and broken limbs. He was almost undistinguishable from a zombie, and would have been left behind had he not spoken.

"Who the hell are you?" he barked at the people in the Jeep.

"Narkis?"

He realized who they were. They were from up north, where zombies and sand were foreign concepts. But they were Narkis's loyal followers nonetheless.

"Gorman?" said Narkis. "Is that you?"

Gorman hopped out of the Jeep, followed by two other raiders, and they rushed to Narkis's aid.

"Shit, Nark. What happened to you?"

"I'll tell you what happened. A trio of nobodies destroyed us."

"Nobodies?"

"I'll tell you more in the car." He winced. "Pick me up. Put me in the backseat and take me to a damn hospital."

Gorman and his two followers scooped Narkis up between them. They were careful not to agitate his broken limbs, but it made no difference. Being lifted into the air while his broken legs and arm dangled in the air was excruciating. It felt like he was falling apart in their arms, and he gritted his teeth in agony until they set him down in the backseat of the Jeep.

With Narkis in the car, Gorman got into the driver's seat and started off. They sped northward in the direction of Undeshire.

"Alright Nark," said Gorman. "Fill us in. What happened?"

"Me and the boys had just got back from wrangling a taxman. We got a bag over his head and were about to feed him to the zombies. Everything's going great. We toss the taxman into the pit and I'm watching his insides come out. I turn to Linus and say, 'Hey, go get my bag.' And you know what happens next?"

"What?"

"We hear someone up in the tower bump into the bell. We've got intruders. Linus starts climbing up that ladder while I've got Hules leashing some of the zombies, since we don't know who we're dealing with. Me and some of the boys crawl up to the roof just in time to see this punk-ass college kid draw a sword and kill Linus. The punk and his girlfriend jump off the roof and are about to get away when Hules comes out with the zombies, and we all corner them. This next bit is where it gets shitty.

"We're about to do these college kids in, when this maniac in a Jeep comes out of nowhere. Runs me over, then pulls out a shotgun and cuts through the whole crew. I'm in fucking awe as the gang just stands there and lets this freak destroy us. He and the kids get in their Jeep, and they're gone, and I'm left there wondering what the fuck happened."

"How long ago was that?"

"Three days."

"Shit, Nark. You survived crippled for three days?"

"You think I'd go down that easy? It was only a matter of time until someone showed up. Could have been weeks in this backwater, but someone would come by eventually."

"Well we're going to get you to a hospital, they'll fix you up. You have any idea who did this to you? Any names?"

"I heard one name," Narkis revealed. "The one with the sword. _Lou._"

They drove to Undeshire, arriving there after the sun had set and darkness had descended on the land. The town's hospital wasn't very big, it had a staff of about thirty, but it worked well enough. The doctors there were able to give Narkis a new arm and a fresh set of legs—they had replacements stocked up—but were unable to do anything about his damaged eye except clean it and dress it. He would wear an eye patch for the rest of his life.

"You look like a supervillain," Gorman remarked as Narkis stepped out of the operating room.

"Good." He marched past them toward the exit, and they followed.

"Where are you going?"

"Warehouses. My buyers are there."

"You haven't heard about what happened to them?"

Narkis stopped. He looked at Gorman. "I haven't."

"They were killed. All of them."

"Fuck," he hissed. "We're still going."

They got into the Jeep and drove across the river to the warehouses. The one Narkis's buyers were using was blocked off by police tape, but that didn't stop him from tearing it down and walking in.

"Stay here," he told Gorman. He walked into the warehouse and found two police officers there.

"Hey," one of them said. "You can't be here."

"Is that so?" Narkis didn't stop. He approached one of the shipping containers, and heard growls of the undead within.

"Get away from that!" One of the cops came up behind him and put a hand on his shoulder. Narkis spun around and punched him.

"Oh shit," the other cop said. "You're—you're Narkis."

"Yes I am," he affirmed, and drew a pistol. The two police officers didn't bother him after that. They never did their jobs again.

Gorman appeared at the warehouse entrance moments later.

"Nark? I heard shots."

"I told you to wait in the car."

"I thought you might be in trouble."

Narkis stepped away from the shipping container. "Is that how you and the rest of the raiders operate up north?"

"What?"

"I told you to wait in the car. A couple gunshots were all it took for you to disobey me?"

"Like I said, I thought—"

"Save it."

Narkis and Gorman walked back out to the Jeep. Gorman's two raider friends were there, waiting patiently.

"I don't think I caught your names," Narkis said to them.

"Geordie," said one.

"Markus," said the other.

Narkis shot them both in the heads.

"What the fuck, Nark!" Gorman yelled.

"That was your fault. You disobey orders, people get killed. They would have _lived _if you had done what you were told."

"Narkis, you're insane."

Gorman was slugged in the face. He fell to the ground.

"Are you serious?" said Narkis. "You're all I've got up north? What kind of name have you made for my crew?"

"Calm down!"

Narkis offered a hand to Gorman and helped him up. "That was a glimpse of the way we run things down south. Either you man up and follow the rules, or you die. Get it?"

Gorman knew better than to keep arguing. "I got it."

"Then come on. Let's pay a visit to the inn—maybe Lou stopped off here."

They emptied Markus' and Geordie's bodies from the car and left them there. Then they drove the nearest inn—a large building meant to look like a grand log cabin—and walked inside. The interior smelled of crisp burning wood and the musk of the outdoors. It was supposed to be a nature-themed lodge, but as someone who had spent plenty of time in the wilderness, Narkis knew how inauthentic the place was.

He stepped up to the front desk, with Gorman following, and rang a small bell. A smiling young lady stepped out and greeted them.

"Hi there! Sorry for the wait. Are you here for a room?"

"I'm here to see the guest records."

She gave him a funny look. "Sorry, but we don't let anyone see the records except for lodge staff. I can get you a room though."

"Lady," he said, and drew a pistol. "Don't make me do this."

She had no qualms showing him the guest records after that. Narkis and Gorman found the last person to stay at the inn was named Argus Pearl, but that name didn't sound familiar to either of them. There was no entry for anyone named Lou, and for a moment, the trail seemed dead. Narkis thought the people who ruined him had gotten away.

And then he had an idea.

"Do you have security cameras?"

"Yes," the receptionist answered with a quivering voice.

"Show me the tapes."

They went into the back office and she accessed the security cameras. She jumped back to the last guest they had, Argus, and Narkis immediately recognized the people in the video.

"Stop," he ordered.

"What is it?" Gorman asked.

"That man—he's the one who came in the Jeep. And that's Lou behind him." He looked at the receptionist. "Him—is he Argus Pearl? Is he the one who bought the room?"

"Yes."

Narkis looked pleased. "We know all their names then, except for the girl. But I doubt she will be leaving Lou any time soon." He turned away from the security feed and started for the door. "Come on, Gorman. We're done here."

"What about this one?" he said in regard to the receptionist. "What if she calls the police?"

Narkis stopped and looked at her. She was terrified. "She won't call the cops on us. Not if she values this town." And he walked out.

Across the street was a bar. Narkis didn't like the look of it—its neon sign and upbeat atmosphere were too youthful and cheery for him. He'd still drink there though, but before that, changes had to be made.

He and Gorman walked in. The bar's dozen patrons shifted their gazes to the door, and Narkis didn't have to introduce himself for them to know he was trouble. Two dirty men, dressed in leather and furs, one of them wearing an eye patch and having three replacement limbs—the bar patrons already recognized them as raiders. But raiders were a common thing throughout all of Blockland's frontiers, and some gangs were less threatening than others. Two run-of-the-mill outlaws didn't pose a threat unless they were notorious.

But Narkis was the definition of notorious.

"Well look here, Gorman," he said loud enough for the whole bar to hear. "They don't recognize me. My new legs and my eye patch have made me a new man."

"I guess they have _Narkis._"

The people knew his name. They cleared out of the building fast and without a complaint, leaving the bartender alone and fearing for his life.

Narkis and Gorman sat at the bar.

"Barkeep—a round of beers."

The bartender swallowed hard. "Sure thing." He ducked behind the counter and pulled out a couple glasses and filled them up. "On the house."

"I appreciate it." Narkis looked past him, into one of the back rooms. "What's back there?"

"Uh, storage."

"It looks like it could use a cleaning for the next half hour."

The bartender took the hint and left them alone. He disappeared into the storage room and didn't come out until a half hour had gone by. In the meantime, the raiders were left to talk.

"So what's the plan now?" asked Gorman.

"The plan," said Narkis, "is to find Lou and Argus Pearl—then kill them." He drank from his glass. "I'll be the death of Lou."

"How do you expect to find them? We have nothing to go on."

"Oh yes we do. Argus drove a fine Jeep, a hard one to miss. I'm sure there's someone in this town who saw where he and Lou were headed."

The raiders drank their beer and left later that night. They would begin a hunt for Argus and Lou the next morning in pursuit of vengeance. Dozens of people would die in their wake, the majority of which being totally innocent.

Lou was a catalyst like that. Blockland was a static place before he came along—sure, it had its power struggles, and its genocides, and its peacetimes. But the day Lou fell from his universe into Blockland's was the day all of that paled in comparison to what was ahead.

* * *

**Author's Note: **Thank you for reading up to chapter ten. As a burgeoning teenage writer with a love for storytelling, it means a lot to know someone likes my work enough to stick with it for over 28,000 words. The first ten chapters focused on introducing characters and setting the stage for the main conflict of the story, so if you feel it was slowly paced, you're not wrong—it has been largely exposition so far. The part of the story that comes next should be more exciting. Here's to another ten chapters.


	11. The Next Act

**CHAPTER ELEVEN: THE NEXT ACT**

Lying in the darkness of his room, Reed's eyes drifted along the walls until they came to rest on one feature—the mosaic Princess Valance made for him. While everything else was shrouded in the nighttime, that piece of art stood out like it refused to be silenced. He had to admit it wasn't a very accurate depiction of a print gun, but he liked it nonetheless because of the sentiment behind it.

He got out of bed and crept over to the door. Imperial guards patrolled the corridors of the castle throughout the night, but they were low in number and only passed by his room once every ten minutes or so. That gave him more than enough time to sneak across the hall to the princess's room.

Pulling the door open produced sharp creaks that echoed throughout the hall. They sounded painfully loud to Reed, since he was responsible for them, but in reality they were no louder than a rat scampering across the floor. Nobody noticed.

He took a step into the hall and looked around. There was no sign of the guards, so he continued forward and approached Princess Valance's door. Despite his mannerly upbringing, Reed didn't knock. It would be too noisy and could attract guards. Instead he opened it up without a care and walked inside, then closed it behind him.

"Melinda?" he whispered in the dark room.

"Who's there?—Reed?"

"Yeah, it's me."

The princess could be heard moving around in her bed, and then the lights came on in the room. She had flicked a switch that toggled them.

"No," said Reed. "Turn them off. The guards will see the light."

Princess Valance nodded and hit the switch, throwing them back into darkness. The only light they had now came from the open balcony, where the full moon glowed white.

"What do you need?" she asked. "You could get in trouble for being in here."

Reed didn't speak. He crawled into her bed, which was big enough for four people, and lay next to her. He breathed shallowly, letting her movements be the only thing he felt.

"Well? Say something."

"Melinda," he began, "you are beautiful."

"I—I am?"

"Yes. I don't know how you feel about yourself after being stuck in this castle all your life, but you're amazing."

The princess would never tell anyone, but she always had poor self-esteem. After being abused by her father for so long, and being denied the chance to socialize with anyone her age, she was left with plenty of time to dwell. And all that dwelling culminated in her developing a very bad self-image—she thought her appearance and personality might be why her father kept her locked up all the time.

Now that Reed was telling her it _wasn't _all her fault, she found herself holding back tears. He was such a great friend. He always made her feel better.

"Are you okay?" he asked. She realized she hadn't been speaking at all, just sitting in the bed in silence.

"I'm fine." She threw her arms around him. "Thank you."

"You're welcome."

And then she took a risk by kissing him. She didn't know how he would respond to the kiss, but it would have been painful not to do it.

He responded positively. He kissed her back, which surprised her in the best way possible. Lukewarm shivers ran up and down the princess's spine, and her skin became very hot. She found herself desiring another kiss, so she planted one more on his lips—then he kissed her back again. They didn't stop kissing after that.

All the affection filled the princess with a foreign emotion. She had never felt it before. It could best be described as the excited attraction of one's first romantic encounter. _She liked it a lot. _Holding Reed close to her body and exchanging kisses, feeling his face against hers, was something new and fun.

She reached down and undid the buttons on his shirt. He had a modest build—years of living in the lower class of Canopy Capital didn't leave a person well-fed and shapely. Reed was lean, but that didn't matter at all. Princess Valance liked him for who he was. She sat up and slid her sleepwear off over her head, leaving her torso bare. Then she threw herself down atop Reed and locked lips with him again. Their nude chests in close embrace was like a furnace beneath the blankets.

• • •

King Valance was in the royal bedroom. Things were going well for him. The Chrome Empire had struck a rich vein of metals in the south, the Free City of Relifour was eager to trade with him, and his daughter was up the hall making love for the first time. He knew that because her room was bugged with microphones, which fed into a receiver in his possession.

She was a tender lover. Her moans and whimpers exuded delicacy just like her mother. The king forced himself not to turn the receiver off for the entirety of the lovemaking—he wanted to hear it all. It would only strengthen his motivation.

• • •

The princess awoke with an aching in between her legs. It hurt, but it wasn't a totally bad kind of hurt. It reminded her of the previous night's events—she had lost her virginity to Reed. She was happy about that. Reed had retreated to his room afterwards to get some sleep, and she did the same.

Now that morning had come, she got out of bed and tidied her hair up so it was presentable. Then she walked into the hallway and went downstairs to get breakfast. Reed's door was closed, so he must have still been sleeping. The table in the meeting hall was filled with food just like every other morning, though the princess was surprised to see her father sitting there. Usually he woke up much later than her, or ate in his bedroom.

"Please, take a seat." He gestured to a chair across from him. She made her way over and sat down. "Eat, my love."

Princess Valance plucked a few pieces of fruit from a nearby bowl and placed them on her plate. She cut into them with silverware like she was taught, and brought each bite to her mouth with a fork. The fruit was moist like Reed's lips.

"I have a question for you. It might sound strange."

The princess ate her fruit without looking at him.

"Do you love Reed?" he asked.

Then she stopped eating.

"It's okay if you do, dear," he said. "I won't be angry. I'm not like I used to be."

The princess put her fork down and swallowed her food. "Why do you want to know?"

"Because I care about you. And if you love that boy, then I want to know."

"Why? It's not like he's dangerous."

"Darling, it's not like that. I don't think he would hurt you. I want to know because you are important to me—and if you love him, then I had better learn to love him too."

The princess wasn't sure if her father was being sincere. For all she knew, he might want to kill Reed. He'd done things just as bad before.

The king saw how hesitant she was. "I understand. You're afraid to tell me. That's okay." He stood up. "Come with me. I want show you something."

He led her out of the meeting hall to the front gates of the castle. Outside sat a stagecoach, drawn by a pair of golden horses.

"I had hoped you'd tell me _before _you saw this. But I suppose this is the best way to prove to you that I'm being genuine."

She looked up at him. "I don't get it. What's the carriage for?"

"I have a day trip ready for you and Reed, assuming you're in love. A bit of an excursion for you two."

"An excursion? Where to?"

"Up into the mountains." He pointed north. A mountain range abruptly put an end to Chrome Capital there, forming the northern border of the Chrome Empire. On the other side of the mountains was the Primordial Jungle, where the most savage animals in all of Blockland resided. "While no citizens dare to venture into the mountains, I've had some land developed up there. One might call it a secluded getaway."

"A getaway."

"That's right. It's very quiet, and it's very beautiful. If you love Reed, it would be a fine place to go for a few days. There are art supplies up there—you two like to make art, don't you?"

"Yes."

"Then you and him should pay a visit."

"You're serious, aren't you?"

"Of course."

That was the first time Princess Valance believed her father wasn't heartless. She thought he really was trying to turn over a new leaf. She liked the new him.

"I do love Reed," she said.

"Good. I'm happy for you." He smiled. "Now go wake him up and tell him about this."

The princess nodded and returned to the castle, then disappeared down a corridor. King Valance walked in after that and made his way to Wolfe's quarters. He knocked on the door.

"Enter," Wolfe said from within.

The king opened up the door and stepped inside. Wolfe's room was small, and decorated extensively with hunting trophies. A pelt rug sat on the floor. The bed was covered with hide blankets. Photographs of Wolfe sitting next to dead animals covered the walls.

"She's gone to get Reed," said King Valance. "Gather up fifteen guards for the escort."

"As you wish." Wolfe got up from his table and lumbered across the room. He and the king walked out, closing the door behind them, and prepared for the journey into the mountains.

• • •

"Reed," the princess said as she opened his door. "You're not going to believe this."

He rolled over in his bed and looked at her. "What?"

"My father has a trip for us. He built a getaway up in the mountains and wants us to go."

"What are you talking about?" He sat up. "A trip?"

"That's right. The carriage is waiting outside."

"Why does he have a trip for us?"

"Because he knows we're in love."

Reed's eyes widened. "Did you tell him?"

"Yeah, but only after he told me about the trip. I think he really wants to do good."

"Well then," Reed got out of bed. "Let's go."

• • •

King Valance and Wolfe stood side by side in front of the castle. Behind them was the stagecoach they'd take into the mountains, surrounded by fifteen imperial guards for protection. They had spears slung across their backs, but held laser rifles in their hands—just one example of Blockland's technology mixing together.

Princess Valance and Reed appeared in the castle entrance. They trotted down the front steps and stopped in front of the king. He offered them a harmless smile.

"You two have quite a surprise waiting. Follow me." He turned around and started for the stagecoach, with Wolfe following behind. Reed and the princess exchanged excited glances.

The king seated himself on the front of the stagecoach and took the reins. Wolfe opened up a side door and helped Reed and the princess climb inside, then closed it up. The interior of the box was very plain compared to the gilded, ornate outside. The stagecoach lurched as Wolfe climbed onto the front, sitting down next to King Valance.

"You two comfy back there?" Wolfe called to them.

"Yes sir," said Reed.

King Valance whipped the reins and the horses began to pull them down the road. The guards standing around the carriage began to walk alongside it, and the princess realized they must be there for security. The mountains weren't the most dangerous place in Blockland, but they were inhabited by wolves and snow golems, so it only made sense to bring along protection.

"I wonder what my father has up in the mountains," said Princess Valance.

"It must be something amazing. Did he describe it at all?"

"He said it's a very peaceful getaway. It has art supplies too."

"If it's half as nice as the castle, we'll be in paradise."

They watched out the windows for a while. The city fell away beneath them as they took a road leading up to higher altitudes. Chrome Capital was an enormous city, the biggest and most populous in the known world. It was possible there were larger ones out there—but explorers had yet to find them. Everyone assumed the oceans surrounding Blockland's known regions were endless, since no exploration party that sailed into them ever reported discovering another landmass. A lot of parties never returned, in fact, which suggested they sailed until they ran out of food and died. Because of that, not many people ventured far into the oceans.

Reed drew the curtains inside the cab and looked at the princess.

"What is it?"

"Do you think your father heard us last night?" he whispered.

"We were quiet. If he heard us, he hasn't made any mention of it."

He nodded. "Good."

"Are you worried?"

"A little. I probably just need to relax." He reached into a pocket and retrieved some fryole petals.

"You brought fyroles with you?"

"Of course." He popped them into his mouth. "I have more. Do you want some?"

"Oh, why not." She accepted some petals and ate them.

They spent the next hour in a daze. Reed, still sleepy from when he was woken up, dozed off on his bench. The princess stayed awake, but she was so inattentive that she might as well have been asleep too. She mostly stared at the ceiling and the drapes inside the box, utterly dumbfounded by their existence.

When she came down from her high, it was obvious the stagecoach had progressed further into the mountains. She threw the curtains open in one of the windows and peered out. Unlike the castle, which had plenty of beautiful flora, there was no vegetation in sight. The land was white and covered in snow.

The princess also noticed the guards had taken up a tighter formation around the stagecoach. When they set off, the guards were loosely organized around it. But now they kept a strict order along its sides and rear. Princess Valance tried to lean out one of the windows to get a better look at the land, but the guards wouldn't allow it.

"No, Princess," one of them said. "Can't have your head out the window. Too dangerous."

"What's dangerous about it?"

"It's a safety hazard, my lady. Just following orders."

She retreated into the box and felt uneasy. She knew it was snowy up in the mountains, but didn't know it would be this barren. It was also a little scary not being able to see the surrounding land. She felt captive.

Not long later, Reed woke up. He also tried sticking his head out the window, but was given the same treatment by the guards. They wouldn't let either one of them look around outside—their view was restricted to whatever came parallel to the windows.

After another hour of travel, a smell drifted through the stale mountain air and hit them. It was the smell of smoke. The stagecoach stopped shortly after that.

"We're here!" King Valance shouted from outside. The imperial guards rushed to the stagecoach doors and opened them up, then helped Reed and Princess Valance to the ground. Their feet sank into the snow.

"King Valance," said Wolfe. "Who are those people?" He pointed at a snowy ridge overlooking the stagecoach. A cluster of pale figures stood atop it.

The king sneered. "Snowmen. They're harmless—they've got no arms. The most threatening objects in their arsenal are _skis._ The heat wards them off, anyway."

"Uh," said Reed. He was on the other side of the stagecoach, where Princess Valance assumed the building was. "That doesn't look like a getaway." The princess looked up into the sky. Thick plumes of smoke rose into it.

"That's because it isn't," said King Valance. "Welcome to the Smeltery." The princess walked around the stagecoach and got her first view of the building.

The Smeltery was not the secluded retreat the princess expected. It was an industrial complex built into the side of the mountain, with imposing smokestacks and darkened windows. The snow surrounding the building was coated in black ash.

The princess knew something bad was going to happen and wanted to run away before she got caught up in it. She backed up but bumped into a guard, and after turning around, saw they had formed a wall behind her and Reed.

"Come along, you two," said the king. He walked toward the entrance. "I want to show you _my _art."

The guards seized Reed and Princess Valance by their arms and forced them to walk. Wolfe followed close behind, ready to catch them if they squirmed free.

They passed through the front doors and were hit with a wave of heat. The interior of the Smeltery was like something out of a nightmare. Grated catwalks crisscrossed between massive vats filled with molten plastic. Slaves, bound in chains with armed guards overlooking them, tended to each vat and carried supplies throughout the facility.

"You must be wondering what this place is," said King Valance. "This facility is responsible for a _lot _of industry in the Chrome Empire. Bricks, weapons, tools—it's all made here. There are other manufacturers of course, and they use more ethical methods, but none of them beat the level of production here."

King Valance led them over to a platform in front of a vat. While fencing enclosed every catwalk for safety, the platform he stood on had none. Anyone could walk off of it and fall directly into the lava.

"What—"

"Silence, darling," the king interrupted his daughter. "You will get an explanation in time. But for now, do me a favor—shut your mouth." He clapped his hands. "Wolfe! Show them how it's done."

Wolfe walked past them and approached a door. He opened it and disappeared into the room beyond, then came out moments later. He held a pair of zombies in each hand, gripping them from behind by the collar. They snarled and tried to get free, but their hands were bound to their sides and they couldn't reach him with their mouths. It was the first time Princess Valance ever saw a zombie, and they terrified her. They looked like people but acted like animals.

Wolfe stepped over to the edge of the platform and stood with the zombies in-hand while King Valance spoke.

"The Smeltery was originally built to keep zombie corpses from building up. Their bodies are toxic—we can't just kill them and leave them lying around. Crops would be ruined, famine would set in, and eventually all of Blockland would be devoured." The king turned to Wolfe. "Go ahead."

Wolfe tossed the zombies off the platform. They landed in the vat, floating near the surface for a few moments because of how viscous the lava was. The guards dragged Reed and the princess over to the edge to watch the zombies melt away.

"Watch this next part carefully."

Wolfe walked over to a control panel on the adjacent catwalk. He pressed a button, causing a hole to open up at the bottom of the vat. Molten plastic poured out, settling in a mold beneath it.

"The cooling process takes a few minutes," said the king. "But once it's finished, and the plastic has cooled in its mold, we get something like this."

Wolfe handed a laser rifle to the king.

"Who was this made from, Wolfe?"

"Sad sap on the frontier named Provo. Couldn't pay his taxes."

"Ah yes, that's right." King Valance stepped closer to his daughter. He got down and looked her in the eyes. "The Smeltery doesn't just melt down zombies. It's also where we send criminals." Fast as lightning, he jerked the rifle in Reed's direction and fired twice.

"No!" the princess cried. She looked over and saw the guards had released Reed, but he wasn't dead. He lay on the ground in agony. Both of his feet had been shot.

King Valance made his way over to Reed, standing over him in triumph, and looked over at Princess Valance. "For years I've punished you. I've locked you in your room, starved you, beaten you, done _everything _I can to break you." He shook his head. "But no. _Nothing _ever works. No matter how I disciplined you, I could always count on you disobeying me the very next day.

"But recently, you've gotten worse. As if I never showed you discipline in your entire life. Sneaking out of the castle, making a mess of your mother's old art room, eating those damned flowers—you have gotten out of hand. And no conventional punishment has ever been enough to quell you.

"Maybe this time you'll learn your lesson. Maybe this time you'll think before you act. Darling, I love you, but I have to do this. Just keep in mind that what is about to happen could have been prevented."

The king tossed the rifle over his shoulder and reached down. He grabbed Reed by the collar and lifted him up, then turned around to face the vat.

"Your pillows," King Valance whispered. "They were molded from your father."

The horror of that sentence struck Reed like a bomb, and then King Valance threw the shell-shocked young man into the lava. Princess Valance screamed and shook to get free, but the guards held her tight. They brought her to the edge of the platform so she could watch Reed die.

In the molten plastic below, Reed thrashed to stay afloat while his face caught fire and dripped off his body. His tortured cries echoed throughout the Smeltery, but the dozens of slaves who heard it did nothing to stop the atrocity. It only took a few seconds for Reed's legs to burn away, putting an end to his attempts to swim through the lava. He sunk faster after that. Hot plastic poured into his mouth as he dipped beneath the surface.

"Wolfe—start molding!" King Valance ordered. Wolfe pressed the control panel again, and the vat opened up at its bottom. Molten plastic filled the rifle mold once again.

Princess Valance passed out from both the heat and the shock of what just happened. Her father slapped her awake a few minutes later with a laser rifle in his hands.

"This is what Reed amounted to," he said, and held the rifle out for her to examine it. "Oh, but look here—an imperfection."

Reed hadn't fully melted before the vat was opened up. As a result, one of his hands was preserved and jutted out from stock of the rifle. His fingers begged someone to save him.

"Even in death he is a disappointment. A failure." King Valance smirked and handed the rifle to Wolfe. "Have it mounted in the meeting hall. High up."

"Yes, Your Majesty."

King Valance grabbed his daughter by the cheeks and made her look him in the eyes. "If you don't want this to happen again then you had better fucking behave."

• • •

The meeting hall used to be the place Princess Valance went to for comfort. She got her fill there, eating and eating until she could eat no more, and that made her feel better about herself. But now, being in the hall filled her with nausea—the rifle forged from Reed's melted remains was mounted at the head of the hall for all to see. It was dozens of feet in the air, too high for her to destroy it.

Even if she _could _reach it, she wouldn't bother. If the mere sight of the rifle made the princess want to vomit, touching it must be a million times worse. It would stay there for a while. At least Princess Valance knew to never trust her father again. He was without an ounce of morality—melting people into weapons in a facility staffed by slaves. It was horrible. Only a monster was capable of conceiving such an idea.

The princess would spend the next couple days in her room. A lot of that time would be spent sulking in depression and suicidal thoughts, but some of it would be productive. She turned on the television and switched it to a news station. The newscaster was discussing a recent battle just outside Chrome Capital.

"Twenty have been confirmed dead while thirty-one are wounded," said the onscreen newscaster. "Of the dead, eighteen were rebels and two were imperial soldiers. We can count this as a major victory on the part of the Chrome Empire, because as it turns out, the rebels were guarding an underground armory. The armory wasn't just stocked with weapons, but information too, pointing at the locations of a half dozen other rebel bases, which we can expect the Empire to eliminate in the upcoming weeks." The story was true, but it was only allowed to air as a form of propaganda.

Princess Valance knew there were people who opposed the monarchal rule of the Chrome Empire, but she had never had the opportunity to learn anything about them—before this, the power of the rebellion was a mystery to her. But now she saw the dissenters her father so often spoke poorly of were _organized. _They had weapons and gathered in numbers.

And from that moment forth, Princess Valance knew she would someday help the rebellion overthrow the tyrannical rule of her father.

• • •

There was a knock at King Valance's door.

"Come on in," he said. A royal servant opened it up.

"You sound very cheery today, Your Majesty."

"That's because I am. Do you have news for me?"

"There's a caller for you on line one. Says his name is Narkis."

"Thank you." The king waved the servant away, then stepped over to his desk. A phone sat atop it. He picked it up and pressed a button connecting him to line one.

"Narkis," said King Valance. "You called?"

"That's right. We have a problem."

"I'm well aware. I got news that your buyers in Undeshire were killed a week ago and you hadn't been heard from. What the hell happened out there?"

"We were hit."

"Hit? By who?" King Valance sighed. "Narkis, don't beat around the bush. The Empire _needs _those zombies for our weapon production."

"I know. Trust me, I didn't _want _my crew dead. I've been working on tracking down the fucks who did this to us."

"And how has that been going?"

"Great. I already know their names. We're dealing with an Argus Pearl and a Lou."

"Argus Pearl. He has a surname."

"That's right."

"Well, I'll look through the Empire's genealogical archives for you. I'll tell you everything I know about this Argus Pearl character. Perhaps we'll find his place of residence."

"No need, Your Majesty."

"And why is that?"

Narkis laughed. "Because he's eating across the street."


End file.
